Admire Beauty
“One must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.” – Vincent Van Gogh
photography
Jon + Amanda
As I’ve said, I don’t do weddings unless (a) I know you and (b) I like you.
That’s why I was happy to capture Jon and Amanda’s wedding a few weeks ago. Amanda and Jon are family, and their small wedding in my dad’s backyard was intimate and lovely.
Photography can be an awesome gift to give – longer lasting than cash or a toaster oven. Don’t be stingy with it.
For Every Season
Matt Thomas has great things to say about accepting and adjusting to seasons:
More and more, I try to live in harmony with the seasons, not the clock.
Here in the Midwest, we’re experts at seasons. And I definitely pick projects and to-do items that reflect the time of year. Winter? Get outside and shovel, and a few photographer interviews. Spring? Yard work and thinking ahead to summer projects. Fall? Finish up projects, enjoy a shit ton of apple cider, try roasting some acorns, etc.
Maybe I’m a creature of habit, but the seasonal routines are very comforting for me.
Start the crockpots full of chili, folks. It’s autumn.
Shop and Enjoy
With the release of my new book (thanks for all the kind comments, by the way), this might be a good time to mention that my photo print store is open – even if I don’t give it much love.
I’m on Society6. They make the whole process easy, and give you lots of good options at a reasonable price.
Photography isn’t about making money to me. It’s about making work and sharing work. I get requests often enough that my store becomes an easy way for people to buy my pictures.
Shop, and enjoy. And if there’s anything that’s not up there that you wish was, please let me know.
Lost and Found
My Canonet is missing.
It could be stolen, or it could be lost. But it’s gone. The camera, and a roll of film with 20-ish exposures from my 365 project.
What a bummer.
That means most of September is missing. Maybe a bit of late August. Lots of sunrises and foggy mornings – those magical times when photography is so fun this time of year. The light changing, the leaves falling, the hot days and cool evenings.
It could be that I left my little rangefinder in my front seat, and then left the car unlocked overnight, a prime opportunity for a wayward thief. Or it could be that me, the absent-minded photographer, left the camera sitting somewhere out of sight, waiting to be discovered again.
The point is that I can’t leave the 365 half finished. No, I’ll load a roll of Lomo into my Olympus and keep going, and try not to pine for those lost photos from earlier this month.
Lost, or found, I have to keep going.
New Routines
Settling into the new house, here six months after moving in, means doing things in different ways than before.
Mowing the lawn? It takes half as long now. My commute? About 20 minutes shorter. Moving into town, we have time in the morning to let the kids sleep in a bit before taking the boy to school.
We take walks like we used to, just around a more suburban setting. We play out in the yard, as always, it’s just that the yard is not as big.
Little things, here in there, that I’m still getting used to.
Photo Book Now Available: #abandoned
I made a thing.
Seeing as how my musicians portrait project is on hiatus, I’m releasing my new photobook, #abandoned, a collection of urbex and abandoned photography from the past few years, all taken on my iPhone.
Better to ship something than nothing, right?
#abandoned is a simple 8″ square softcover book that includes 30 images of abandoned houses, factories, and farms – mainly in south central Michigan.
Although I’ve largely retired from urbex photography, I felt like I had a few more projects in me. One of them was to make a photobook of all my urbex adventures, but keep it to mobile photography. I’ve made plenty of photos using my “big” camera, but my iPhone is always with me, even when my DSLR isn’t. The photos are all of high enough quality to make a modest book. On Instagram, I’ve had a few people ask me to make something like #abandoned, so here it is.
I wanted to keep it simple and affordable, so I’ve posted the book on MagCloud for order. It’s $15.
My style, such as it is, comes in large part from my explorations in abandoned properties. There came a point where I was both shooting urbex locations and developing my creative voice. I feel like a lot of these photos come from that combination of recklessness and light chasing, and are a good representation of the kind of work I do now.
Order your copy today, and please let me know what you think.
Opposite of Failure
It’s been a weird summer.
It started with such promise. But as the months passed, more and more projects started to slip. My musicians portrait project fizzled, and I found myself picking up my camera less and less.
Just today, I turned in the keys to my studio. I paid for the whole month of August and only accomplished one portrait shoot. I held on to it a month longer than I should have. Guilt made me keep it – you paid for this great space, don’t give it up! – until I couldn’t logically justify the expense.
After a while, I had to tell myself to stop feeling guilty, and accept this new-found funk for what it is: a down period.
Plenty of creative people go through it, and there’s tons of ways to deal with it. My own method has been to recognize it, accept it (grudgingly), and hope things get better.
The sticky part is thinking back on previous years where I was productive. I look back through my Lightroom catalog and Flickr albums and yearn for those creative periods. I was shooting every season, every day, every situation. I was making documentaries and exploring my community and learning about other artists. From 2012 until this spring, I feel like I was on fire with photography.
At the start of the summer, I tried to power through this down period I felt coming on. I started my musicians project with half a heart, but after a while I couldn’t ignore my creative block. I tried really hard, too.
With this blog, I wanted to make it a daily thing for at least a year, and then try posting a few times a week after that. My strategy worked decently well for a while, but now I feel like I have nothing to say about the larger world of photography. I’ve turned inward, sharing and documenting what’s going on around me, with little thought to best practices or experiments in picture making. These days, it’s mostly just picture sharing.
Could it be that I was so steeped in photography that I got burned out? That doesn’t explain my desire for more productive times.
Several things happened in the spring that I can point to and say, “Maybe that was it.” We moved into a new home, into a new community, had a new baby. I was a year into my new job, hitting my stride. My commute wasn’t what it used to be. All of these were big life-changing circumstances. Did they affect my photographic output? Or was it something else?
Time will tell. I’ll let the autumn come and try to capture the season and its changes, and use the cold months to think about this funk.
My hope is that, on the other end, I’ll come up with a recipe for whatever the opposite of feeling like a failure is.