I had some things I was thinking about last night when I created this post, but since I didn’t write them down in blog-post form, they’re gone forever. This was the weekend after my birthday (which was on a thursday). We took Friday to drive up to a spot about half an hour outside tahoe, a little private campground that we tried to go to at the beginning of the season, and failed because it wasn’t yet open.
This time it was open, and we set up and had a nice overnight and day sitting on the river. The water there is already really cold (like, got cold being in it for more than a little bit), but I waded around a bunch and took pictures of the pretty light filtering through the trees, and of some cool rocks I saw, and the gold sand in the bottom of the river. I assume it’s not real gold, or a bazillion people would mob the place.
The tree pictures strike me as something that would be a huge effort to get a good print out of, but might actually be worth it. Maybe this weekend? Probably not, free time has been cancelled for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, this is today. (or maybe yesterday at this point).
Posted by Matt on 2018-10-03 01:38:08 -0700
One thing about this feeling like a slump is that it might just be the way I’m feeling. I realized after writing that the other day that I hadn’t even cleared off the camera in a couple weeks, and maybe I just needed to trust the process a little more. These are maybe not my best work but I am getting better at getting close to people, and at just having the camera ready to shoot. Sometimes I still catch it asleep, which is a little frustrating.
I wanted to post every day, but I’ve been building a new keyboard instead. The Infinity Ergodox I use at work is about to have a USB port failure, so I need to repair it, but first I have to rush through this build for the semi-wireless one (there’s a wire connecting the halves but optional for connecting to the machine). It’s mostly wired, and the case bits are coming along nicely.
Anyway, here’s today.
Posted by Matt on 2018-09-28 00:51:08 -0700
Three weeks ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at Odd Salon for the second time. The theme for the night was Explore, and there was an emphasis on non-white-western-male explorers, and different kinds of explorers. My talk was on the surface a classic sea-fairing tale, “40,000 miles and a century early: The treasure Voyages of Zheng He.” There’s a video online here which I refuse to watch on the grounds that I went through it once already. Someone tell me if it’s okay to look. The main thrust of the argument wasn’t just that he was a great admiral that went all that way, but that he also exercised this continual escalation, from one thing to the next in his life, to see how much he could do.
You’ll notice I’m slipping towards three weeks of backlog (almost back up to the traditional month) and that means I’m almost back to the place where I feel guilty enough about the size of the backlog that it puts me off blogging because who wants to confront all of those pictures? And all the writing and such that also needs to happen with them? But I’m also in a bit of a slump shooting the last week, not terribly well rested and been missing my walks. So, I don’t have much beyond a new gimmick to report (put on a super wide rectilinear lens on, and point it straight up). So, all that to say I’m going to keep on putting up images, trying for a post a day.
I had some thoughts about this slump I’m having today, too. This is a thing that always happens with a new camera: get the thing, be very excited about it, and go out and make a bunch of good pictures with it over the first couple weeks. I even had a honeymoon period like that with the GoPro (an otherwise not very good camera for the sorts of photos I take), where I really just played with the thing and had fun. Then, about a month in, a slump hits. I can’t maintain that energy forever, and I find myself falling into old patterns of working, which means I don’t get as much energy from shooting, and feel kinda meh about the whole thing.
So, the insight I had today was that I need to figure out how to break those patterns of working, see things from new perspectives, etc. I might break out The Photographer’s Playbook and have some fun. I also need to start getting up early to shoot more San Pablo. Right now it’s not in a place where it’s a book, except maybe one of those boring art books that go with exhibitions and don’t sell out their first printings. It might be good as individual large prints, and I need to buy some paper to start playing with that too… so! There’s work to be done.
Posted by Matt on 2018-09-23 23:12:32 -0700
