Maybe you noticed I didn’t write anything last week. It’s the first week I’ve missed since I started this blog at the beginning of the year. It wasn’t that I was lazy. It’s just that I didn’t have anything to say. Or at least anything that I wanted to say.
Castoro Vineyard, Paso Robles, Pentax K-1, 100mm, 1/40 @ f/16 ISO 100
When I started this blog I had a pretty fuzzy idea of where it would go. I wanted to share the journey I was on, in the hopes that it might interest or inspire others who are on a similar path. I think I’m a pretty good photographer. Not amazing, but good. After four decades of making images you would hope you would learn at least a few tricks. Over the last year and a half, as I have been able to focus daily on my craft, I have learned more. About photography, about myself. At some point you realize you have mastered the technical side of the craft. Not in the sense that you are a master of the craft, but in the sense that you understand the theory behind it and the technical steps that are required to achieve a certain result. You may not know how to do something, but you know enough that you can learn how to do it.
But that is just the beginning. When you reach that point, you begin to think about what you want to do with your photography (or drawing or painting or writing or cooking or gardening or anything else). That’s when you find yourself stepping gingerly into the netherworld between craft and art. As you’ve probably picked up on by now, that’s where I find myself. I’ve been questioning why I make pictures, and what I want to do with them. What kind of pictures I want to create. That is the journey of exploration and introspection I wanted to share on this blog.
Daffodil, Fuji GFX 50R, 120mm, 1/7 @ f/6.4 ISO 100m (7 image stack)
But over the past few weeks or more I’ve gotten away from that. Rather than furthering my journey, the blog has been interfering with it. I’ve spent too much time thinking about what I want to write this week, and finding or making images to support that. And too little time working on my craft and seeing what develops and then just writing about that. The proverbial tail has started to wag the dog. So it’s time for a small reset. Both in what this blog will be and what I will do with it going forward.
First, I’m going to relieve myself of the burden of writing a blog post on any predetermined schedule. I’m just going to post when I have something to say. Maybe that’s once a week, or maybe it’s only once a month. I’m going to let the art drive the blog, not vice versa. Second, I’m going to broaden the types of things that I write about. It may be a creative insight, or perhaps it will just be about a recent outing, a dig into my archives, or a new piece of equipment. Stay tuned. It’s all part of the journey.
* * *
Just because I wasn’t writing doesn’t mean I wasn’t working over the past few weeks. I sprinkled a few of the images that I’ve made in this post. The spring wildflowers are starting to pop, and I’ve been shooting them in my garden and in the wild. We took a quick trip down to Paso Robles to meet some friends we haven’t been able to see since the start of the pandemic, and I made a little time for photography (and a lot more for wine tasting). I’ll be posting more from that trip in the coming weeks. (Teaser: I finally took the Bronica out for a spin again). Back home, I photographed some vegetables and made a risotto. And I worked a little bit on the website, updating some of the galleries and adding and rearranging the images in the Slideshow on my home page. Poke around and see what you can find.
Sea snails, Tidepool, Montana de Oro State Park, Pentax K-1, 31mm, 1/800 @ f/10 ISO 500
And last but not least, I’m happy to say that I’ve been selected to make a (very) brief presentation at this weekend’s online Out of Chicago Live conference, during the Saturday evening participant takeover event. My topic will be “Abstracting the Ordinary,” a presentation on some of the intentional camera movement techniques I use. If you’re planning to attend the conference (which I highly recommend), please stop by and check out my presentation. It may be entertaining, it may be informative, it may be cringeworthy. Perhaps all three. (Can you tell I’m a bit nervous? Never done one of these before. Be kind.)
Until next week (or month), stay happy, stay focused, stay creative.