Paul Lester Photo

Childhood memories

This weekend, as I walked around my former elementary school, McEbright Elementary, I was aware of a number of feelings. Feelings of nostalgia. Feelings of joy. Feelings of sadness for innocence lost. I wanted to keep these feelings alive because I thought that they would make a great project. Certainly, I didn’t want to slow down the process by writing. It’s too cumbersome.

I had been thinking of purchasing a digital recorder. So, I went to the only place that I was pretty sure would be open on Sunday morning, Walmart, and purchased a Sony 1 GB digital recorder for about $60 USD. It’s compact, very easy to use, and has a number of features to make organizing one’s thoughts fairly easy. You can organize your thoughts into folders: A, B, C, D, E.

After I made the purchase, I came back to the school, got back into the mood, walked around the playground, the building, and recorded my thoughts and memories. All through the rest of the morning, I simply pressed the record button to record any thoughts that I had. It’s a great way to take notes, etc. of those great, yet fleeting, ideas that you have along the way. I think that this will be my constant companion from now on.

When I returned, I sat down and, as I worked on my book and listened to the snippets that I had recorded. It was fantastic way to recapture those on-the-spot feelings that often soften and even disappear after a very short time.

The downside to this particular recorder, as well as other Sony recorders, is that it is a proprietary format and has only Windoze software available for it. There is no Mac equivalent that I have found. I did see a post on a forum of a work-around. Plug the output of the recorder into the Mac and record it directly to the machine. Yeah, it’s digital to analog to digital, but at least it will be captured on your computer. Also, I found in that same post that Olympus recorders are Mac friendly.

I can say that I would have bought an Olympus, if Walmart would have had them AND I would have known about the Sony Windoze-only issue. However, it’s not a show stopper. I’m glad that I bought it. However, I could have saved about $20 by getting a 512 MB model.

Another non-photography tool for the bag. I think that I’m now officially multimedia!

In response to the The value of critique post, Scott C said:

What I’ve found the most helpful are sites where a photographer posts a picture and then walks through their thought process in choosing the subject, composing, lighting, post-processing, etc. That type of talk-through helps me see into the photographer’s ideas. I can accept or reject the outcome, but at least I know why choices were made. This in turn helps me rethink my choices when I shoot because I have new ideas.
–Scott C

This statement has been at the back of my mind for several days and now, as things bubble up to the surface, I think that I’ll make an effort to answer it. Certainly, this speaks to my specific ways of doing things.

I am an intuitive shooter. That is to say that if I feel something, which sometimes gets distilled down to a single word, I’ll take a picture of it. While framing, there may be a mental discussion on how best to convey that one word. That word might be: awe, funny, tender, sweet, amazing, profound, or a number of other words.

But first, I have to be able to really see it, whatever it is. Our eyes play tricks on us. If you don’t believe it, just go here and have a look! Having that knowledge, I think is one key to ‘seeing’. I realize that my brain seeks to fill in the details with what it believes should be there based on prior experiences. It sees labels and assigns prior knowledge to that thing: “That is a blackbird. Over there is a tree. There are some people fishing, etc.”. Basically, it’s telling me that I already have ‘knowledge’ of what these things are, so I don’t need to explore.

When I’m out, most times I try to form a disconnection between the label and the thing. This is accomplished quite easily, sometimes, if you are patient. Have you ever written your name over and over and over again? Soon, the letters don’t even make sense anymore. They become gibberish. This is the same thing that happens when I sit quietly in a location. First, when I arrive, it is Azalea Park in Summerville, SC. Next, it is a bench in a park. Next, some trees and a path. Next some light, shadow, and a breeze, etc. Then it starts to fade into a bunch of abstract things. Soon, I start to see only shapes, colors, and activities with no labels attached. I can feel this shift. That’s when the single words, more like ideas than labels, start to appear. That’s when the shooting begins in earnest. It usually takes me about 10 or 15 minutes to get there, sometimes less, sometimes more, sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Prior to that, the rest is just warm-up on the way to that state. I’m easily brought out of this moment. All it takes is a word or two from a stranger, which happens frequently, or perhaps a call on my cell phone. *Poof*, back to left brain mode and thinking.

Sometimes, simply staring at something causes this transformation. Staring at a puddle, for example, that has plants sticking out of it suddenly becomes an exotic island full of possibilities. This is letting the labels drift away. Perhaps you have done this yourself. Have you ever found a nice place to lie down and have a look at the sky as the clouds drift by? Suddenly, after a period of relaxation, they are no longer clouds but all sorts of other shapes. If someone distracts you and you try to continue to see that other possibility, it’s difficult. You’ve slipped out of that moment. Thought and labeling have resumed. Back to clouds they go!

As for post processing, that too is a different realm. Again, I’m seeking to portray an idea that I had, rather than an actual photo of some ‘thing’. Sometimes what I see during the shot and what I see during the post processing are quite different and I come up with a different intention than when I started.

About this photo and the process: When I first arrived at the park, it was my intention to take a few photos, read a bit, walk a bit, then head home. I sat on a nearby bench for a while, read a little, then moved over to brick wall just at the head of this small path and continued to read. I stopped reading for a bit to have a look around. It was then that I noticed the different intensities of light and how this small path looked very inviting. So, I took several pictures using different focal lengths. In post processing, it looked pretty nice, but in color it looked ‘nice’, but it didn’t seem to portray what I wanted, which, I think was an invitation to walk down this path, or perhaps just look down it. I tried several variations of toning and finally landed here, giving it the proper amount of nostalgia, I think, and an inviting look.

Well, Scott, I hope that gives you a look into my process. A brief summary would be: I go. I wait to see what happens. I try to capture it.

Winter Light

There is another issue that I think needs to be kept in mind and allowances made. This issue is mental health. Pushing ourselves in certain ways, may not be in our best interest. There are many theories and best practice guidelines out there and it is difficult to know what is best for each individual. Here is one that I think works.
…
I think we have all heard of “burn out”. You don’t want this to happen for those things that you enjoy.
–Bob Wong

In yesterday’s post, The work of it, Bob Wong came up with a very interesting comment. An excerpt is above. You can see the entire comment here. I’d like to state the Bob is a much welcomed contributor here and has provided me with several ideas of posts. I like when he visits.

His post made me wonder if indeed we can get burned-out doing what we love, our passion. So, I did what I usually do and went to the dictionary for a consultation to make sure that I really understood what burnout meant and here’s what the dictionary had to say:

Physical or emotional exhaustion, especially as a result of long-term stress or dissipation.

Mozart, who many deemed as a musical genius, was, in fact a seriously dedicated student and practitioner of music. It was said that, by the age of 28, his hands were deformed for all of the practice that he had done over the years. I think, too, of Michael Jordon and his legendary practice routines and love some of his quotes, especially this one:

I can never stop working hard. Each day I feel that I have to improve. Hard work…Determination…I gotta keep pushing myself.

–Michael Jordan

Here, I don’t think that Michael Jordan was talking about pushing himself to do something that he didn’t love. He just kept expecting better things from himself and kept delivering. He wasn’t naturally gifted, but he just outworked any and every person around. As far as we know, he never burned-out on basketball

On a personal note: I’ve been a software developer since 1982. I’ve probably produced several hundred thousands of lines of code, perhaps over a million. I have no idea. Although I do it day in, day out, each and every day, I’ve not become burned-out of software development. I have become burned-out at a particular job because the expectations were much too high, unrealistic is more the word, but the love for development, no matter how much I learn, has never left me in 27 years. It’s the same with photography. I practice several times a week and always want to know more. I don’t always do the work because I “let” life get in the way, sometimes. Yet, every time that I recover, I’m glad to have that camera in my hand.

Frequently, I’m disappointed … sometimes, severely, but I never feel burned-out. I may be overwhelmed by other aspects of my life, as I have been lately, but the passion has never died in all of these years.

I think that burn-out, so to speak, is the culmination of the mental stress that you put upon yourself to achieve something great and not having it happen. It’s not doing it for the love, but for the outcome. If you get no outcome, or perhaps no accolades, the stress builds and you try harder to prove that you are worthy. You’re not doing it for the love.

With these thoughts in mind, I really don’t think that burn-out is really possible. Any other takes on this? Have I missed something?

Go! Go! Go!

There have been many times when I’ve gone out to shoot, done the shooting half-heartedly, and come back home with nothing. There have been other times when I’ve gone out, tried to be clever and think my way into good shots and, once again, arrived home to some very disappointing shots. The question then is: “Why were you thinking?!”. It never works.

Let us say that I’ve become very spoiled working so close to the beach. I never thought that I’d visit it so much, but I find my self there about 4 times/week. There is a practical reason for it. When I leave work, traffic is horrendous! If I leave at my usual 4:45 PM, I will get back to the apartment at somewhere between 5:30, if I’m lucky, and about 6:15, if all is ‘normal’. Without traffic, it’s a 30 minute drive. Should I decide to head the other way, towards the beach, I can be there in about 20 minutes … no traffic going that way for the most part. So, I like to go there, do my walk, catch the sunrise, then head back to the apartment for some food, reading, and sleeping!

Today, I didn’t feel like sitting in traffic, so away I went, off to the beach. When I arrived, I wasn’t so much in the mood for taking pictures, so I walked. After a short walk, camera in hand, I just stopped, sat on some steps leading down to the beach, and enjoyed the breeze and the sound of the water. I had taken few pictures.

Soon, the evening turned orange as the sun began to set. A young man and his dog had come out for an evening of playing. The dog was straining at the harness, ready to get into the water. It was time to play. I sat and watch the retriever run lustily after the orange ‘stick’ that the boy was throwing. Then I became a bit more animated and decided to let the D40 be a sports camera and it did really well. The top picture is my favorite shot of the group, but I got lots of good ones.

After hanging with boy and dog for a while, the evening was becoming a darker orange. Mind you, not a cloud in the sky, but interesting nonetheless. I headed on down the beach and suddenly saw a guy doing Tai Chi! Fantastic. I watched him practice for a bit, shooting all the while and really enjoying myself. We were both communing with Nature in our own way. It was getting pretty chilly and the wind was picking up a bit, but it just made it seem all the more real. I was enjoying every sensation that I could.

There was no thinking involved, just feeling. Even when you don’t feel like it. Show up. One thing is for sure, if you don’t go, you won’t get the picture!

I’m glad that I showed up for these shows!

Wait ’till you hear the whistle …