Category Archives: Artist's Journal
Published! For Kindle.
The busyness enabled by the web — the Facebook thing and its 570 buddies; the several blogs; the unbridled span of artistic and intellectual interests — finally staggered me, and the whole “Bertha-the-Printer” thing (she’s checking herself out by spitting ink as I type) feels like the last straw: I’ve done enough for glory!
My environment may be rich, but I seem to remain ever the bohemian rattling around inside of it.
I haven’t set down the cameras, far from that, but am more inclined to license images than print them (unless there’s an order out there tall enough to cover the complete costs of the work and produce some pizza on the side), to continue shooting for fee (of course), and then, using Amazon’s vendor program, to get started on the next e-book.
Teaching, Statuary, Augusta Memorial Park, Waynesboro, Virginia, April 9, 2013
Of course, I would like to post commissioned work on this blog, but, alas, as regards the above, I was merely a passenger on someone else’s trip yesterday (see “Statuary, Augusta Memorial Park, Waynesboro, Virginia, April 9, 2013”).
My work has a reliably luminous quality these days, and for that, many thanks to Nikon glass and Adobe software.
Composition: sturdy, formal (most of the time), focused.
Luck: unbelievably good, although I am one of those who believe there is no bad light — in fact, as long as there’s light, there’s visual atmosphere. Perhaps with what I call “response photography” — the photographer as traveler through an environment — atmosphere x subject x depth-of-field x frame becomes the photograph, and atmosphere itself I interpret as location x lighting extant or lighting design. That’s why in “constructed photography” — the photographer as producer who imports into a frame the elements of his work — the determination of mise-en-scene (everything in the scene, visual and intellectual) leans so heavily on building a set and lighting it or discovering a location and working with season and day to construct a moment for recording fit to concept.
Back to luck: if you go out to a garden to shoot flowers and encounter heavy gusts, you might be unlucky. Of course, if you go out without intention other than to find something lovely or worth the film — these days, editing time at the computer — and you catch long colorful stems trembling in the light and blurring here and there at lower speeds, well, you might be lucky after all.
Be all that as that may be, thanks to my friend, I had a good day afield and at times lost among memorials and their elegiac and familiar figures and encouragements.
ISO: Work!
I don’t know whether the skills — and by inference the capital in equipage and knowledge — exhibited in this space are going to work for me, as it were.
This morning began with my editing a friend’s resume — yes, I can do that too even though approaching my own (there’s a new section on the above tabs) plainly scares me.
Oh my God, what have I done with my life!?
From one perspective, I can answer that without cringing: if deflected, discouraged, or inhibited early on,perhaps, I’ve nonetheless spent my life reading, writing (well, “journaling” at least), playing music, and engaged with photography.
Obsessively.
Of course.
From another perspective, I may not be anything like what America’s combined accounting, engineering, and political cultures want.
Had I gotten any kind of smooth launch into music (one with much less other traditional intellectual enrichment), I’d have hoped by now to have transitioned to underscoring films.
In another life — that train needed to take me to Boston.
This other organic thing, less one-track minded, has sprawled a bit, and here am I squeezing it back into form, casting for “tasking” and otherwise molding it, kneading it around projects.
A combination of the two — direct service relationships and income; independent creative entrepreneurship — comprise my needs.
Offered: a terrific broad editorial and research capability bounded by English only and not by geography at all, such may be the “life of the mind” on the World Wide Web; general photography, where one indeed has to go somewhere with a camera, making the same an east coast (mid-Atlantic, New England, southern states) sport from my location close by two major American Interstates: I-70 and I-81.
Troubled manuscripts — academic, business, creative — may be welcomed here!
🙂
Also, schedule permitting and pony car willing, speeding with Nikon glass away from this desktop on a client’s mission would be welcomed here too.
It has to happen.
All kinds of things are just ready for it.
Communicating Arts - The Journal 