Worth Waiting For

It’s too almost too hot and humid to take pictures outside, so I play around in my garage studio, where the light is soft and the mosquitos mostly leave me alone. I take pictures of fruit and vegetables from our CSA box, sweat running down my back as I try to hold still. I take digital images first. These are those. And then I mount the medium format film camera on the tripod, attach the cable release, and take the same pictures. Different lens, different focal length. Still sweating. The first one is a little busy. The second one, a little wacky. I can’t wait to see how the film versions compare, so you may see these photographs again.

I’ve been waiting my whole life for this. The opportunity to discover myself.

Out and About

I struggle to see pictures in black and white. I use my iPhone camera, set to black and white, taking snapshots to help train my eye, hoping to get a feel for which scenes and subjects will make for moving and evocative images. Landscapes are also not my strength, so this roll of film was a challenge—black and white and landscapes, mostly. I have some questions about tones, preferring the softness of a gentle sepia color to the starkness of straight up black and white. But I don’t have a consistent workflow to process film scans to produce those tones. At least not in the same way, with the same tones, so as to create a body of work with consistency and flow. So much to learn . . .

Beaver Dam, Caroline County, Virginia June 2023

Fallen Tree, Government Island, Stafford, Virginia, June 2023

Country Roads

I spend some time watching Kyle McDougall’s video, 3 Key Lessons I Learned Making My First Photobook. I love Kyle’s book, An American Mile, and add it to my wish list. Studying his pictures sends me back to my own. His views of the American West are fascinating to me because they feel simultaneously familiar and foreign. The East Coast has old abandoned buildings and wide open views, but the skies and the surroundings are different. Everything here in Virginia is so green. This is another of those pictures that I deemed unworthy—mostly because after awhile, falling down houses begin to feel like a cliché. But on second thought, views like this are part of my everyday life. Absolutely worthy of attention. A page in the photobook, A Virginia Summer.

Rethinking

Home is a complicated construct. Not really the charming cottage with curated dinners. At least, not most of the time. Maybe more like the trees that surround us . . . with both roots and wounds that run deep. There is an abiding sense of where we came from—but who we are—that might develop based on the tension between belonging and raging to be set free.