the road to recovery

So yeah, had a bit of an interval there where I wasn’t taking a lot of photos. Not the whole four months of injury/surgery/recovery, but for sure the two after surgery, and not a lot of the larger project (which I talked about a little in my last newsletter) at all, since it requires quite a bit of walking around. There are people that would have pushed through the injury to get to a place where they were still making work, but I’m not one of them. I’m really fortunate that I had the support of my dear wife through all of this, or I doubt I’d be anything but a shambles, still.

As it is, I’m recovered enough that the work is now, again, ongoing. I need to figure out the routine from here; what I’m shooting, and what I need to do. I had a really productive conversation with Sara Terry, the photographer leading the workshop I was at in NYC, about it, and at least now I have something like a thesis; something more than “it’s interesting” to go on. I mean, the people that fed me the story, more or less, said that to me, and I felt it was the sort of subject that’s good for sniffing around, photographically. Eventually you have to figure out what exactly makes it interesting, sharpen your tools, and work until you have the story. I think I’m there, or I’m at least one step further down the funnel.

Oh, and: The last three photos are with my new favorite lens, the Voightlander 35mm 1.4. It’s really pretty great. Zone focusing is good, wide open with the RF is good. It just feels less constrained than the 50. I’ve been a 50 ride-or-die person for two decades. This is pretty big, but I feel like it’s a focal length I can really do some work with. Expect to see it more in the posts to come.

Posted by Matt on 2019-10-28 00:10:25 -0700