Quiet music, winding down the to-do list, cozy days at home catching up on movies, and looking back on the year that was – that’s my ideal Christmas.
Yes, we have the spirited family get-togethers and the hustle of Christmas morning with the kids. There’s all that shopping and cooking. But mentally, when I think of Christmas, I think of a quiet season—peace on Earth, goodwill toward men, that kind of thing.
This year, I’ll use the quiet to plan ahead to next year and develop some ideas.
One that’s been simmering for a while now is the idea of turning my creative portrait projects into an ongoing series. Instead of just artists and musicians, I could expand the scope into other creative arenas.
I also want to experiment more with video: how-to walkthroughs, on-location tours, and even video profiles of people. I do it all the time at work, so there’s no reason why I can’t try it for personal projects.
Finally, I’d like to bring back the idea of a studio where I can invite people in and take their portraits. Hang a sheet, grab a light, and fire away.
There are always more ideas than time and energy to see them through. That’s just how I work.
But mulled long enough, like a fine dark wine or some spiced cider, good ideas get better with age.
Settle in. Enjoy the season. See you all in the new year.
One our way up north this summer, I took the scenic route (as I often do) through the little towns of Stockbridge and Perry, Michigan. Along the way, I made a mental note to stop by both towns and take photos.
I picked a foggy morning on the first day of autumn to head up to Stockbridge. I’m glad I did, because the mist gave the town square a vibe. I made a whole morning out of it, shooting along the way and back home, and it ended up being a really productive (and fun) day out.
Shot on the Canon 5D with a combo of the EF 28mm and 40mm.
Year after year, Flickr keeps trucking along. It’s still my favorite photography social/sharing platform. I’ve “met” so many great photographers on the site.
One of my go-to favorites is Zach Huggins out of Texas.
Where are you, and what do you do?
I live in Oak Cliff, a small neighborhood in Dallas, and I work as a scanning technician at an art printer. I scan artwork for printing.
How did you get started in photography?
I had a few cameras when I was a kid and in high school, and I loved snapping shots with those, but I didn’t really get into photography until college. I was a film major and I took my first digital camera on set to take behind the scenes photos, and that was when I was hooked.
What do you like about your photography, or photography in general?
I draw a lot of inspiration from movies and film, so anytime I get a photo that looks like it could be a film still, it’s a win for me. I like it when my images imply a story that started before that frame and continued after it. I love visual language, and to me, filmmaking and photography are siblings.
One of the things I love most about photography is that it has kept me curious about the world and people around me. It really is the art of seeing.
I got to know you through Flickr, where you manage several groups and bring a real sense of community to fellow photographers. What do you enjoy about building communities and sharing with other photographers?
One of the things that keeps me inspired is looking at others’ work, and Flickr is still one of the best places to see a wide variety of photography and meet other photographers. I also appreciate that, unlike a lot of other photography-oriented sites, I’m not inundated by ads and bots trying to sell me things. It keeps the focus on photography, and that’s why I have stuck around.
Originally, I started getting more active in groups to keep active on here when COVID shut down the world and I wasn’t able to go out and take the kind of images I’d like. I’ve found it’s a great way to find new photographers.
Your photos feature friends, your community, and different events you attend. Do you keep a camera with you at all times? What inspires you to shoot what you do?
That’s another thing I like about photography! It keeps me social and going out. If I want to take interesting photos, I have to go interesting places and meet interesting people.
I started carrying a camera with me at all times a long time ago, and that’s the number one thing I recommend to anyone wanting to get more into it. I got tired of seeing cool things and not being able to capture them (this was before cell phones had cameras worth a damn), so I started carrying one every day.
Even now that smartphones are pretty good, I like to have a camera because it makes me a little more intentional with my shots. If you are lugging something around and the only thing it can do is take photos, you’re more likely to do just that. 🙂
You shoot with a variety of cameras, on film and digital. Any favorites? What’s your go-to gear?
At this point, I will shoot with just about anything, and I like being able to pick up almost any camera and figure it out. During the pandemic, I started buying older cameras. I found a Youtube channel called OneMonthTwoCameras about using older ‘outdated’ equipment and fell down a rabbit hole of early 2000s digicams. I started buying cameras that I couldn’t afford when they were new, but you could get for garage sale money now. There’s something very satisfying about getting a really cool image with an old digital camera that is as slow as molasses and has limitations that modern cameras don’t.
As far as favorites, I have a couple of newer cameras I love: a Panasonic S5 and a Fuji X100v, and those are amazing for paid gigs or shows. For older digicams, there’s three that come to mind: The Canon S70, just a great all-rounder, a perfect party snapshot camera. And two Olympuses, the C-7070 and the C-7000. The 7070 has some of the best ergonomics of any camera I’ve ever used, and the C-7000 has a certain something about it that I can’t explain. On paper, it doesn’t sound great, it has a weird focal length, a slow lens, the camera itself is horribly show. But something about it clicks with me. 🙂
Any upcoming projects or shoots you’re working on?
A friend of mine released an EP last year, and we’re in the pre-production stages of making a music video for it. I take any opportunity I can to get back on set doing BTS photos; it will always be my first love with photography. I’m also hoping to do more portrait photoshoots this year, and I’m putting together a zine that I want to get printed before the year is out!
I moved around a lot as a kid, but I call Brooklyn, Michigan, my hometown. It’s the place I lived the longest, went to school the longest, and really grew up.
Brooklyn is a small village in southern Jackson County – the home of Michigan International Speedway, the Irish Hills, and Hometown Pizza, my first jobby-job through high school and even into college when I came home for breaks.
My family still lives in Brooklyn, but not in town, so I don’t get to see the village square every day like I used to. That’s why I took a hot August night, grabbed some pizza at Hometown, and hit Main Street for a photo walk using my trusty Canon 5D and 40mm f/2.8 lens.
This time of year is busy: it’s apple season, and that means lots of picking, juicing, and fermenting apples.
Each fall, I’ve looked for and picked apples wherever I can find them. Family trees, random trees in the park, and this year, I met a neighbor who had a half dozen McIntosh trees. So we went one early Saturday morning and picked apples.
The McIntosh apples, a half bucket of sweet yellow apples from my father-in-law’s yard, and a collection of bright red crabapples from our own backyard helped create about eight gallons of unfiltered apple juice.
From there, I split up those eight gallons into a few batches of hard cider.
The bright red juice is from the crabapples, which helps create a cider with a kick – a little something extra. When you ferment all the sugar out of juice during cider making, you have to have a little personality, and the crabs – with their acid and bitter tannins – helped add complexity.
From here, I stick a bit of yeast into a fermenter, sit the juice in a dark, cool spot, and let is sit for a few months. In the juice, the yeast turn all the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
And I had a bit of juice left over to enjoy with the kids – some “family-friendly” sweet cider, like what you buy at the orchard.
I officially started making hard cider in the fall of 2019, but this really became my pandemic project. I practiced, made hard cider out of store-bought juice, added other fruits and flavors to it. Now, I have it down pretty pat, and have even started making mead (fermented honey) and cyser (fermented apple juice mixed with honey).
There are lots of guides out there on how to make cider, but my favorites come from the folks at City Steading Brews – here’s a good starter recipe. Just know you’ll have to invest in some equipment and supplies: fermenting jugs, funnels, sanitizer, yeast.
But the juice? That’s the fun part. You can do like I do: pick and juice your own, using a standard home juicer. Or you can pick up a simple gallon of cider from your local orchard (just make sure it has no preservatives in it – ascorbic acid is okay), bring it home, and have it start bubbling into hard cider in no time.
Much like photography, the process is just as fun as the final results – except with cider, you get to drink it.
For my last two big portrait projects, Artists In Jackson and Musicians In Jackson, my goal was to interview and photograph local creatives and assemble those stories into a book. Prep, execute, deliver – all in one big thing.
I had the thought: what if, instead of treating them as projects, I treat them as platforms.
Instead of disappearing for a few months and coming out with a deliverable – like Moses carrying down a photo book carved in stone and delivered by divine inspiration – those projects become a channel that has regularly updated photos and stories. Instead of releasing a set of stories as a book, I keep releasing stories and never really finish.
Now, I could collect those stories and photos – say, every 20 – into something like a book. But the book isn’t the point. The doing is the point. It keeps building, more like a seasonal Netflix show than a daily newspaper.
This would relieve some of the pressure of feeling like I had to make a collection of something. As an alternative, I keep writing and making pictures and posting something when I have time. These projects become more like living, breathing websites than printed, finished books. The stories then become material for social media, newsletters, and website updates, rather than the reverse.
I’ve been collecting lists of creatives that I missed out on the first time around. By building and adding to that list, I can keep the stories coming – as long as I’m alive to tell them, potentially.
I’m not Catholic, but I do love the idea of giving stuff up for a limited time from now through Easter. I’m in the Ben Franklin school of self-experimentation, and I’ve been giving up things I love for years. Potatoes, coffee (ugh! that was a rough one), alcohol – limitations are good, and knowing you can survive without these things builds character.
This video by HealthyGamerGG kick-started my flirtations with Lent deprivation this year. I was initially attracted to the title (“Why Finding Purpose Is SO HARD Today”), but after watching, Dr. Alok Kanojia’s points made a lot of sense about life in general.
I do tend to stuff my brain with external stimuli. I don’t let myself get bored anymore. And while I’ve taken up meditation again this year, it is a bummer to read social media all the time and not have time to just sit and think.
So for Lent, I gave up Twitter.
Twitter is a trashbin on fire these days, with all the behind-the-scenes ownership and business fumbles it’s made. I choose not to follow that stuff closely, but I have noticed that Twitter mostly brings me negative news. It’s a bummer to scroll through tweets every day. Giving it up means not allowing that negativity into my brain. It also means more quiet time to do something else.
Like edit photos! Or take photos! Or anything else that actually brings me joy.
While this blog post will appear on Twitter, thanks to a WordPress plugin, I won’t see it or the reaction. Instead, I can devote more time to being bored, thinking about my purpose, and reducing my overall anxiety.
Here’s a harsh truth: I’ve taken fewer photos each passing year since 2015.
It’s not for lack of trying or interest. No, it’s mostly because the rest of life got busier – three kids, a demanding job, a new house, chores, spending time with family, etc.
(Another consequence of moving home and work is that I don’t have an interesting commute anymore. It’s mostly city and highway driving instead of the beautiful back country roads that used to fuel my hobby.)
That means, besides family vacations and a rare sunbeam coming into the home office, I have fewer and fewer photos to take, edit, and post for public consumption. And I miss doing that! I miss the process of capturing pictures and making them my own.
Lately, my solution has been to go back and rediscover some of my past work. I can look at it with fresh eyes, and tinker a bit. I have a good selection of photos that I’ve taken but never touched or shared in the years since.
Take my film portraits from the Musicians In Jackson project. I was initially so dissatisfied with how they turned out that I shelved them in favor of the digital versions. Now, looking back at them, they were actually pretty fun, and using a bit of Lightroom magic, I can make them look how I prefer.
There’s a ton of abandoned pictures and others that are stuck in a Lightroom folder somewhere. All I have to do is look for them, play with the sliders, and boom – something to share.
Now, that also means I’ll eventually run out. And I can’t fix the not-enough-time-for-picture-making problem – not easily. But this scratches the creative itch well enough to keep me busy for a while.
Is there a word for “guilt over not making something?” I’m sure there’s a German word out there that expresses this sentiment perfectly: That feeling of remorse for not making or doing anything in a while.
There’s productivity guilt, but that’s not exactly the same thing. I’m talking hobbies and interests, not work.
Here at the year’s end, that’s been me. Sure, I make photographs all the time. But I feel guilty for not having any big projects in the works. I have ideas, but I always have ideas.
Instead, I have to tell myself it’s okay to take a break. Recharge my batteries. Start anew.
My bet is that once I start again, it’ll be hard to stop.
Have a great, safe holiday season and a very happy new year.
