Noticing

These are not my best work. They were taken with my iPhone camera, not my fancy dslr. And still they are the pictures that are the most me. The ones I feel down to my bones. I am a person who notices details. I am blown away by little things - a hand on mine, a funny joke, a vase of tiny flowers, special spoons, and slivers of light.

Mixing Things Up

I’m thoroughly enjoying the posts by Martin Kaninsky on Photography, Reconsidered. In today’s post, How to Stop Taking the Same Photographs Over and Over Again, this question hit home for me:

So how do you know when you have found your way of photographing, and when you are just making photographs you already know how to make?

I think about this a lot. I’ve been taking pictures of the same places and the same kinds of things for decades. I wonder if my way of seeing is getting stale. And then I remember that I am naturally hard on myself. I take a deep breath and look for the evidence. I already know how to take a picture like this one. But I would normally walk past this scene because of that mixture of light. The dappled light presents a challenge. So does that wide open patch of skylight and the tree line across the shore. There is a part of me that is confounded by so many variables. What to leave in and what to leave out. The goal isn’t to make every photograph different. It is to leave room for the situation to change your mind.

What Life is Becoming

I love to look at the evidence of life. Not what I imagine it to be, but what it actually is. I took pictures most every day this summer. Many of them were in fields of flowers or farms. And not very many of them were technically “good.” But, I sure had fun. Part of the fun was the nature of the work: sunshine, bees, and walking up and down rows of color. The other part of the fun was playing with my husband: laughing, sweating, guzzling gallons of water, road tripping. When I take account, I notice one thing. I would have loved the whole summer even if there were no pictures. The pictures are the icing on the cake—not the cake itself.

Film scans arrived today. A mixed lot, for sure. But these photos accurately portray my summer experience. Click on the picture below for more views.