Postcards from the Creative Journey

388 - We’re Photographers Too!

While I was making this photograph...

Many years ago, (it’s starting to get a little disconcerting that so many of my stories begin this way) I was out early one summer morning photographing the Carpenter Feed Store. I was on one of the loading docks with my view camera taking a picture of something that wasn’t going to move (that happens a lot when you use a view camera to photograph). Suddenly, a station wagon comes to a stop by the loading dock. A lady rolls down the window and says, “We’re photographers, too!” The station wagon drove off while she was rolling up the window.

I wondered what they were going off to photograph.

387 Opening a Door

 

St. Paul, Oregon 

There’s always that apprehension when you open a door to a place you have never been before. The apprehension doubles if you are carrying your camera gear with the intent of making great photographs. (Isn’t that the way it should be? Nobody should go out wanting to make mediocre photographs should they?) How should you approach the subjects you find? Will you be allowed to stay and make photographs? Will you be able to find any photographs worth making? Will the photographs you make be any good?

Those are a lot of questions to cloud your creative mind. But we still open the door and force the doubts out of your mind. I pushed those thoughts aside and pushed on the front door and began to photograph an old house in St. Paul, Oregon. It was a house owned by a local historical society and we approached it on a whim. Sometimes a spontaneous decision is good and sometimes not. This time it was and there were more than a few fine photographs made; all because we opened a door.

386 Share Your Ten Favorite Photographs From This Year!

Ivey Ellington House, Cary, North Carolina

Ten photographs from this year? It sounds like fun, but I can’t do that. I’m still trying to complete a project from three or four years ago. I am consistently three to four years behind what I am photographing today. It takes me a long time to complete a piece of work. Even if I could come up with ten favorite photographs, would it actually mean that they would stay my favorites? The ones I like right away may only be photographic infatuations and not be very important or good in the long run. 

Blogs on "favorites now" and "favorites later."

I guess selecting ten photographs might be a useful exercise if your immediate goal was working to produce a single photograph. I’m not working that way. I’m looking at folios and projects that consist of between fifteen and twenty images which is not the game that is being played. At least I know why I am not playing along.

The Fourth Generation

The Victorian Lady, Academy Street

 Easter was dull, dreary, cool and rainy, unlike whatever we've been experienced so far this Spring. It was a perfect day to start collecting my digital assets (Do you remember negatives stored in plastic sleeves in three ring binders?) to establish my master data base for the kick off of today’s Blog 4.0. (My first blog was a Lightroom gallery on my web site, second was the white on black version, the third is the current iteration and today’s blog is the fourth generation.) I hope to have all the large images inserted in the blogs by July 4, 2016. There are several things I have discovered so far while updating the photographs for this blog.

One: scanned prints are the curse of the devil himself. How did we put up with such nonsense only a few short years ago? For those that think the good old days were good your memory is short. There are a number of images I used in the blog that were from the Fifty Project. I may have to go back and scan them again to get a higher resolution image. I’m not really thrilled about that.

Two: Remember how we used to back up stuff on CDs? Well, those suckers are getting copied to multiple hard drives as I go back looking for something other than the 500 x 350 by 72 dpi versions of the images on my blog.

Three: Those early digital files were really small. I'm looking for the "high res" versions and some are barely over a kB.

And finally, here’s something that surprised me.

I went looking for photographs, I wound up finding memories.

Friends caught smiling in the shade of the Alkabo School one afternoon. Snapshots of my daughter and her Grandfather wearing fezzes in the living room of his home in Montana. A "gunfight" in front of the Irma Hotel in Cody, Wyoming. And there are more. If there is anything that will slow me down finding the original images I used for the blogs it will be me finding memories that are better than the photographs. Part of me wants to get this search for images done quickly so I can move on to the next project but part of me wants to stop and savor the memories I thought I forgot.  

Photography this an odd, but wonderful thing, is it not?