The Winter Look — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Tonight burned. Fast and white hot she torched across the whole of the sky. Racing Apollo to his chariot home above the clouds. Phoebus, she calls in pastel tones heard in angelic beauty, our pantheon awaits. A show of pure passion, glowing heat, and lithe quickness. A holy ember blazing light white hot enough to stop time itself, and humble enough to give it all back. Restraint wrapped around the power, a subtle mastery masked only in its wisdom.
Tonight’s sunset above the salt marsh held the classic winter look. Brooding and intense cloud striations colored in deep, fiery pastels. The cold fans the flames. The furnace burns brighter, truer. The cold clean air of winter sets a crystalline stage producing light shows in nature’s peculiar brand of high definition. Buy this you will never at a big box store. There’s really nothing like it and no Amazon box to ship it in if there were. A unique species unto her own. She’s the afternoon sky fall cloaked in the rainbowed robes of winter. Breathless you watch her leave, eyes transfixed as though you’re only seeing her singular beauty for the first ever time.
Back writing at The Union Market and I have a problem. Sure I have loads of problems but for the purposes of this exercise I am focusing on one. My photography is wholly uninspired. For four years now I have set adrift atop the inevitable plateau of your talent’s going no where. No gains, no challenges, no growth. Only the muscle memory motions of habit fueled machinations left manufacturing the same caliber of work over and over and over again. It’s a cycle of mediocrity. This plain, man. It’s endless. I need off.
Feeling certain something has to give what are my options? Well let’s work the problem with a good old fashion bulleted list. We’ll even pretend it’s whiteboard style. To address my photographic dead end I could:
Quit—pack it in, drop this hobby and drift upon the breeze until something new falls in my lap; this is both decidedly passive and incredibly on brand.
Maintain status quo—stick to my modus operandi and don’t change a damn thing. Hover where I’m at but continue to find the most joy writing for the photos I make; this, too, is an extremely Greg thing to do.
Buy new gear—the capitalist equivalent to let’s have a child to fix our relationship; the short term gain to long term pain.
Identify a challenge—settle on a new photographic skill or technique; considering I only make landscapes and flower macros with the occasional bug thrown in I have mountains to climb.
Step out of my comfort zone—mix it up, meet new people; if you’re the smartest person in the room, find a new room. The surest path to improvement is to surround yourself with people better and more capable than you. Learn from others who’ve been in your shoes. Worn soles long shot, weary treads long tired from their time atop the plateau. While I was never a great musician by any stretch, I got pretty damn good playing guitar, bass, and even the damn banjo, when I was jamming on the regular with musical types way more gifted and trained than me. Their juice finds its way into your bones by osmosis.
Give a talk—combine some strengths! I am a shy ass person, few will say otherwise. Yet paradoxically I love to talk, especially in front of a live audience, and I’m good at it! Bringing together two skills into one thematic packable could be the juice I need right now. In the interest of full disclosure, I had a perfect opportunity to do this but totally flaked out. Great job, Greg. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Even though I am not as yet clear on what I will or will not do, I am glad I wrote this down. It helps to get your thoughts out of your mind and onto paper. It creates some separation. Some breathing room to think it through with the problem feeling a little less up close and personal. Change perspective to be objective. Even if a thing looks good it may not be serving us. The question is whether the discomfort is strong enough to precipitate change.
Seated at The Union Market stuck on what to write. I’ve got nothing. An intersection? A four way stop with no signs. The anarchy of an unkempt mind. It’s an odd sort of drift. The shimmering grains of control left to sift right through arthritic fingers. More sand down the hourglass of time. An amortized loss no prospector’s pan can withhold. The Ring, man. It will vanish.
Still this is the big mystery, ain’t it? The exalted drama we each one of us play out with this spot of time we’ve got. Each of us observers in our own unplanned play running on as one big dress rehearsal to life. Except there are no second chances—only better doings. The sand grains, man. They’re ours—though only for a moment—borrowed. Walk upon them where you can. Dance, sing. Bury your feet and run your fingers through past, present, and future. As it comes. As it goes. Ours for a while. Build the brightest castle you can; however you can and while you can. Because the sand belongs to time. It hears its master’s call.
In My Own Time — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Improved is my mood. It pleases me to write this. A combination of self imposed interventions coupled with some good old fashion luck reinforced the levies to keep the deluge of depression at bay. First to thank my friends and family—my people—for hanging in there and supporting me. The treasured and unbreakable bonds forged in love and tempered in the flames of hardship keep me strong. Iron does sharpen iron, and lost I would be without them. I love you.
Reestablishing mindfulness and meditation practices, daily and with intent, served to ground me. Tethering me back to my breath—the single most fundamental essence of life. This is creating a setting of ease and space to cope. I use an app called Headspace to guide this practice, and I recommend trying out anything to help guide you and keep you on track. There’s no right or wrong way to mediate. No beginning or end to meditation. There is only what you take with you. There is only practice.
Disabling my social media accounts for about three weeks proved an enormous boon. While I am back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, it is only the latter that has its app on my iPhone. Were I able to share photos from my laptop, I’d have no app at all. I strongly recommend a break to anyone considering it. It’s refreshing and wholesome to lose the anxious connection to the impersonal toxicity of the online world. Now that I am back, I have better boundaries, and going sans app reinforces said boundaries.
Audiobooks came to the rescue, too. Starting in an unexpected way. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! followed up with What Do You Care What Other People Think? surprised me in their countless life lessons weaved into the narrative subtext. This theme of course being ancillary in their intention to let the world into the mind of one of the 20th century’s most gifted physicists. Richard Feynman was far more than a Noble laureate, though. In fact, there was little typical about him. With intention cultivated himself as a curious, skeptical, and inquisitive observer of life parsed through a scientific lens with no space in his brain for fakers. This proved refreshing. I piggybacked this with Jay Shetty’s Think Like A Monk. An instructive tool for bringing purpose, calm, balance, ease, stillness, and peace into our lives. I don’t typically go in for self help books, but this was a joyous journey, and one which offers numerous tangible strategies to help you find your way.
Therapy remains the key piece constant through all this. A safe place to connect with a professional who brings objectivity and experience to your situation. It provides a place to reflect, open up, share, and discover. As self-awareness grows, strategies take shape to help recognize triggers, execute mitigation tactics against them, thereby minimizing the frequency, intensity, and duration of future episodes. If you have been considering therapy but feel shame or weakness, I do encourage you to take the step. You have the strength. Reaching out for help is hard, but it is always a huge leap worth taking. Complicated and difficult is our world. Our hearts and minds more so. Connecting with people to better understand ourselves, our purpose, and our meaning in this life is a great place to start and essential to wellness.
Thanks for reading, and thank you for your support in this.
Plebs Will Out — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
After making this photograph Friday afternoon at the usual Cedar Run Dock Road spot I got to thinking. The exponential increase in not only photographs, but their quality this past decade has been extraordinary. On account of the technological powerhouses forever affixed to our palms and pockets billions of people the world over have ever improving picture making machines at the ready. The ubiquity of smartphones coupled with the increase in data and sensor power has turned every man, woman, and child into capable content creators. This has gifted us with growing volumes of splendid photographs the world over. A brand of photography that gets better and more beautiful with time. The improvement is not only at the hands of technology, either. Through the years as our phone cameras get better, it’s the near constant practice of making photographs everyday which has made us all better photographers. Anywhere you go you’ll find someone, often many someones, making a photo.
This democratization of technology has taken photography from a cloistered craft of the few into a pastime of the many. The equalization of this skill makes us all richer. Smartphones have become the great leveler, bringing high quality picture making devices to so many. This has allowed experimentation and practice by people in places who otherwise would have had no chance to learn the trade. As a photographer this excites me. It helps me to be a better photographer. It pushes us all. It’s a wonder to see regular people turning out inspiring still and videos day in and day out. The plebs will out, and I am here for it.
I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am. —Charles Horton Cooley
I came upon this quote yesterday in Jay Shetty’s audiobook, Think Like A Monk, and damn that is incisive insight. Is it not true we are but projections of projections? A skewed facsimile as we endeavor to manifest ourselves as we perceive others see us. I make this statement without judgement, more as a recognition of observable truth. In all our efforts to make ourselves, we build an edifice as an assumed image of what we think we are to others. It’s a trick, an artifice, a distortion.
The problems here are manifold. One, it assumes we know what others think of us in fact. Two, it gives too much power to the opinions and assumptions of others. Three, it assumes others know us comprehensively enough to distill our full character. Four, and most important, it removes our own agency. It strips us from discovering ourselves in sacrifice to serving an unknowable image we think others hold of us.
None of this makes us bad people, lacking and wanting of autonomy and originality. No, it’s more positive than that. It’s a friendly canary in the coal mine singing out for us to recognize this distortion in better service of our true selves. Be not buried in the soot and morass of assumed thought. Do not be the looking glass projected onto another looking glass when together we can stand apart in front of our own mirrors.
Antisocial indefinite
I’ve deactivated my accounts on the Big Three social media platforms. I said so long to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. This is not a stance in self-righteousness per se, more a timeout from too much toxic information. I doubt you need me to tell you about the inundation of anxiety and filth that has seeped into every post and every comment thread. This coupled with the induced compulsion to keep up, look cool, and fit in, was too much. I needed to get away. It’s something I wanted to do for many years, and I am glad I finally pulled the trigger. Not knowing what is going on in the outside world has been glorious.
There are some drawbacks to my decision, of course. Chief among them will be some lost connections I’ve made over the past decade—connections I cherish dearly. Another casualty is the dissemination of my photography. Far fewer eyes will see my work now. This is a blow, yet I feel the tradeoff necessary. I have this website, little traveled as it is, as my go to spot for creative self expression. I plan to continue posting photographs and writings here. I appreciate each and every one of you who visits my site. It is meaningful support to me.
Round number alert
Speaking of this website, here marks post number 500! Crazy to think I’ve made 500 entries since launching this site upon the world back in January 2014. I never thought I would have gone this far. So here’s to 500 more. Thank you all who’ve journeyed with me along the way.
“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
I first encountered this line watching Peter Jackson’s masterful film adaption of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen in 2001. Having come to the books much later I learned this was a direct lift of Tolkien’s own words. Only a fool possessed with unconquerable ego would not leverage the master as much as possible. The line resonated with me from the jump. Here a world weary Bilbo Baggins, faced with all his wisdom augmented through unnatural age, laments the end to his mentor and friend Gandalf.
It touches on a tough reality—the falseness of appearances. In spite of his age, his 111th birthday fast approaching, Bilbo had not aged in over half a century. Of course the yet unknown ring of power proved at play. Still even in the face of apparent youth Bilbo’s inner self never stopped its natural aging process. Behind the mirror he knew himself wan and tired.
I was a young man when I first came to this line in the theater. A first semester college sophomore, only 19 years old. Still I already felt stretched thin. I was the inadequate amount of butter failing to cover all that mediocre manufactured bread. I got the reference. It landed. It hit home.
At first blush it’s easy to take this single moment in a grand story as a short line about the fears of aging. About the confrontation with our own mortality. Of course that is part of it, you would not be wrong. But there’s a deeper subtext speaking of fulfillment, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Bilbo, in spite of all of his adventures and all of his years remains unfilled. Both burdened and inspired by his magic ring he still wants more.
This, too, resonates with me. I’ve demonstrated some modicum of skill with photography, flat horizon sunset photography in particular. And yet it is not enough. It’s no longer getting it done for me. It all feels like a wash, rinse, repeat exercise in both futility and repetition. Like eating the same dry piece of toast each morning with the same familiar disdain of a routine unwanted. You do it because you feel the pull of obligation. You do it because you feel you have to do it. As if somehow the world won’t turn if you don’t. As though it matters to someone This is nonsense, of course, yet we all know this feeling in some corner of our mind. It’s little more than ego over inflating our importance. Though it’s a discomfort that may precipitate change.
Except this is not fiction, and I am without a magic ring. Though I still have some measure of control. We all have a choice to break habits and make new paths. Even to disappear. For example, after a decade I deactivated my Twitter account yesterday. I have 29 days to go back on this decision, but a big part of me wants to stick with it. I am hopeful I can make this step with Facebook and Instagram next. Maintaining a public persona is hard, and it injects added stress into an already stressful world. It leaves me feeling exposed and lacking, like somehow there’s even less butter in the dish with the same damn piece of toast waiting on the plate.
Autumn We Dance Again — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
When I was a child I welcomed you. You were the harbinger of winter, my favorite season. The calendars in class marked the days with apples in September, pumpkins in October, and leaves in November. Football and cool weather held sway, while holiday specials with the Peanuts gang enchanted our evening. The days grew short and life stayed simple. It was easy.
In adolescence I accepted you with the grudging disaffected disinterest of an awkward teen. Everything was weird and new but you were somehow familiar. We tolerated each other, and I still had the coming onset of snow to long for.
As an adult I bent to your will. Each year you found news ways to deliver familiar tones of sadness. Loss and loneliness proved your calling card, and you seemed to take joy in my pain. Your growing cold and dimming light worked to push me further toward world weariness. Anxieties grew in the dark. Sadness festered in the cold corners of my mind. Emptiness filled my world, and you were always there mocking with a smug impartiality to it all. A season loved by so many kept me stunted and shirked aside. I had not invite to the party. Years turned to decades and I never fit in.
I have struggled with you for years. So much so it is of no worth to name you fall since the word is far too dire. I know search to flip the script. I Seek to write a new narrative. One of acceptance. One of purposeful restoration. I must learn to slow down and breathe. To be more accepting of your grace. Please take my hand and teach me how to dance, sweet Autumn, I don’t want to hurt anymore.
