Postcards from the Creative Journey

The Search is on...

 

One of the things that both digital and analog photography have in common is you have to be able to find the originals (negatives or files) before you can do anything with them. Most folks don’t want to spend the time organizing their files and it can come back to make life a bit more complicated. As Brooks Jensen says, time spent organizing files is time well spent. My analog files were impeccably organized, but somehow, in the transition to a digital world, my organizing skills have fallen off. The Hell’s Half Acre project is almost five years old, so I had to go looking for the original files. I checked both auxiliary (external) hard drives and they weren’t there. I was beginning to sweat. I did find them on a set of CDs that I had burned to preserve these files. I uploaded the images to lightroom to see what I had. Then I got another surprise. More on that next week.

The Adventure Begins

I was invited to exhibit my photographs at Photography Week in Xiang Sha Wan, People’s Republic of China. The theme is Landscape. I will show thirty photographs from the Hell’s Half Acre and Wide Wyoming Projects (both on the “more projects” page on my web site). Square Pegs get promoted if the criteria changes. These two pdf projects total about twenty prints so a number of square pegs will be given the opportunity to prove themselves in the exhibition. I will also attend the opening of Photography Week in Xiang Sha Wan, leaving on December 26 for the festival. For the next few weeks, you can see the additional photographs included in the exhibit and I will share my preparations for this incredible opportunity.

Photographing Until a Project Appears

My wife and I went to Charleston, SC a few weeks ago for a weekend meeting. After we checked into our hotel we went for a walking tour around the old town. I took along “the noisy cricket.” That’s a Lumix DMC-LX3 and if you saw the movie, “Men in Black” you will understand the reference. Charleston is a lovely town and there are many wonderful old buildings to photograph. I photographed until I saw a project appear before me. Once I discovered the afternoon’s project, it amused me until we ran out of light. This building facade is one of those good images that won’t fit into the upcoming project. A true photographic square peg.

Make the Last One a Winner

Another photograph from September 15^th. Some days are better than others, but they must all end sometime. Photography ends when one of two things happen – either your vision gives out or the light gives out. In this case, my vision gave up just after 4:00 pm on that date (that’s what the EXIF data says). It’s a sad thing, too. When the light’s good, you have great subject matter and everything is clicking (Why do photographers like puns?) you get that feeling that you are looking at the last photograph of the day. You try to postpone the inevitable, but you know that you’re done for the day. You look at the ground glass or look through the viewfinder and try to hang on to that last great photograph of the day, let it burn into your mind. You could go “try for one more,” but there’s the satisfaction of making the last one a winner so why take the risk? You pack it all in and head for the house and a cold one to toast the photographic muses and thank them for accompanying you on a good day of photography.