Bring Nature Inside
Hope you all have a great holiday season.
Organizing Information
Writing non-fiction, a writer is basically organizing information (facts, data, analysis, observations) for your audience. It’s creative filtering, using words, sentences, and paragraphs to make sense of the world.
With photography, a photographer does much of the same, but uses portraits, pictures, and projects to organize visual information and tell a story to an audience.
Words are the basic units of measurement when writing. In photography, it’s the individual photograph. But for both, it takes talent and experience to make those basic units do work in an audience’s mind. What do they say when put together?
Taking photos is fun, but organizing information is where photography’s true power shines through.
Woke Up In January
Sunday was raking leaves on a fine autumn day. Monday was shoveling 6+ inches of snow out of the driveway.
Hashtag Midwest Living.
October Walk
After this, it’s nothing but exercise bikes, snowy excursions into the driveway, or parking the car in the garage. Oh, and the leaf raking to come.
A Coney Island High
All these years after Peter Steele’s death and I’m still discovering fantastic Type O Negative tunes.
“Why buy a greatest hits album?” I asked myself at the time. Now I hear these unreleased tracks and I’m kicking myself.
Autumn is Type O season, and thanks to the YouTube rabbit hole, I’m finding some great stuff.
Introducing Musicians In Jackson
After two years of work, interviews, and shooting, my newest community portrait project, Musicians In Jackson, is live and available.
The project, like my previous Artists In Jackson project, is available on the web and in book form. It features local musicians doing interesting things. Each of them represents a unique facet of Jackson’s creative community, from musical theatre to rap to folk, and many styles and media channels in between.
Together, they help make our small Midwestern city a great place to live, work, and play. They help entertain us, heal us, remind us, and connect us. Our musical scene is small, but tight-knit, and gets a ton of support thanks to local venues that value arts and culture. Jackson musicians are just as talented as anywhere else.
Musicians In Jackson took longer than I expected, and I struggled along the way to get the portraits, interviews, and stories done. Something snapped in me earlier this year, where I said to myself, “Enough is enough.” This summer, I made an arbitrary deadline – autumn 2019 – put it out into the world, and then worked like hell to finish the project.
And here it is. I’m excited to share these 14 local musicians with you, and I ask for your support: purchase the book, visit the website, and help me spread the word.
A Great Anything
“I believe anyone can become a great founder, a great engineer, a great designer, a great concept artist, a great fine art painter, a great filmmaker, a great writer…
Not that everyone will, but that anyone can. And it’s getting easier every day.” – Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad.
It’s so true. We have an infinite number of possibilities – and if there isn’t a possibility for you, you can learn something new and go create it yourself.
I needed a platform to sell my books, keep customers up to date, and collect shipping information. Gumroad was that for me during Artists In Jackson, and it’s there for me again for the new project. It’s simple, reliable, and flexible.
Glad to see Gumroad doing well.
Apple Picking
Luckily, our neighbors and the in-laws have apple trees weighed down with apples this year. That meant plenty of fruit for the juicing and fermenting I had in mind.
I’ve long been a cider fan – an apple fan in general – and consider owning an orchard one of my retirement goals. Somewhere along the line, I got the bug to try my hand and making my own hard cider, taking advantage of all the modern brew making equipment and methods. Right here in town, we have a home brewery store with all the supplies I need. That, with some online advice, and I could easily give a batch a try.
There’s a lot to do: wash the apples, juice the apples, sterilize the equipment, add the yeast, feed the yeast, etc.
But first, I had to grab six little hands to help me pick and wash apples from the neighborhood.