P H O T O G R A P H Y

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For the first couple of years, I used a digital camera and without the worry of making mistakes, I shot everything. New energy entered my life and I suddenly began to wake up earlier so I could meet the sun. I left the house on frozen mornings, my boots cracking the ice-cold snow and my breath crystallizing on my mustache. My glasses fogged up as I attempted to capture the colors that crept across the snow on those cold mornings. I had never realized how beautiful sunrises were; how rich and saturated the oranges and red were. One morning as I stood on the side of Mount Sanitas (a small excuse for a mountain), I watched as the early sun made the snow an unbelievable pink.

That's a word too often used, but when I brought that image home and downloaded it from my digital camera and saw it, even I could not believe it. It isn't the best image in the world, but here it is just so you can see what I saw.

One of my first images, hand held, with an Olympus D600L - spot metered, but not manual settings included to show the colors I witnessed and that inspired me so much.

As the winter turned to spring, and the snow grudgingly gave way to spring, grape hyacinths and daffodils poked their heads through a covering a late snow. As I looked through the lens magnifying the flower, and the tiny ice crystals; I felt blessed. It was as if I could go out each day and find something beyond words or thought and it didn't matter what was happening outside. With clouds, the colors were more vivid, with light I could play with shadows. I was like a child with an endless choice of toys. For the first time in my life, I felt prosperous.

In those first months with the digital camera, I shot over 15,000 images, most of which were erased in the camera or shortly thereafter. I went out day and night, took flowers from the store and arranged them or tore them apart. I shot from head on, with them wet and dry, in bunches and in singles. I sat in Chatauqua Park at sunrise for weeks on end and waited for that morning that was the perfect union of clouds and sun, when the light from the yet to rise sun splashes red and orange on the underside of the clouds; when the lights on the rocks of the Flatirons was a kind of liquid rust; when there was no one else but me to see it.

I thought I was so good too. I printed out those images and stared at them in wonder and thought I was gifted. And one day, they were almost all gone. Some of my very special ones were gone in a moment of carelessness and all the pretty images I created were gone except for some inkjet prints on cheap inkjet paper.

I'd like to tell you I did it all for myself, but as I learned to see light and the images improved, I wondered if I couldn't do more with them and at some moment in that period, I made up my mind that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Who wouldn't want to do it? How many of us wouldn't trade our income producing jobs to be artists, to paint like a child and go out every day and find magical things to share.

So there it was. It was like falling in love, partly choice and partly an involuntary reaction to joy. There was simply no turning back.

I soon outgrew the digital, which produced small files and didn't perform so well in low light, had one lens and no manual settings. As my love affair grew and my need to include more or less tugged at the limits of my equipment, I added more. I bought my first film camera - a Nikon N70 and a Tamron 28-200 lens. How it all changed with that decision. The images on film were so much more alive and the range of the lens so much wider and longer. I learned to walk all over again. When that lens became to short, I bought a longer, better lens and a wider angled lens and then an even longer lens, and another camera with more sophisticated controls. I learned to put the camera behind me as if it was invisible and I played with the flowers, the geese and the sunsets more closely.

But, I also carried more equipment with me and soon the walks through Sawhill Ponds were much harder and now I tried t take better pictures. I looked for special things and I became disappointed. After all those months, I looked at my images and found little to like. The more I looked at the inkjet prints; I learned I had really lost nothing except memories in those images. What I held on to so tightly and had lost so easily was no longer my most valuable possession.

You'd think I'd learn from that experience. But that is a lesson that always seems to be learned. I now have almost 2,000 images scanned on my computer and many, many more on slides that have yet to be thrown out. I work on these images and post them for others to see and comment on and I wait for favorable responses. I hold on to these images as if they were part of me.

As I look back on the these past few years and all of gained and lost, all the film I've shot that will never be seen by me or anyone else, I sometimes wonder if it was all just a waste of time and that's why I wrote this article. In the recounting of the joy I had, I remembered what was of real value in the images and that was taking them.

It was the experience and memory of the moon setting over the Front Range, of the smile that came as I watched the goslings at Sawhill ponds as they teetered back and forth on their little legs. I could go on, but in writing this, I remembered that it wasn't what I wasted; it's what I received.

I'd like to tell you that it doesn't matter what other people say about my images when they see them, but that wouldn't be the truth and I'd like to tell you I only do this for myself, but there's always been something inside me that thrives on approval. It's also true that I express passion and feeling and feel things flow through me that seemed blocked before and I hear a voice speak that describes me better than I did before. Like every other endeavor in life, there a dark and a light side, a healthy and unhealthy part.

I'd like to tell you I know what the point of all this is, but the closer I try to get to it, to summarize and teach a lesson, the less defined it becomes. But what I'm doing is telling you who I am as I try to take off the mask and let you see me. I struggle with that as I search my rolls of film to present only my best shots. In between the ones that express something beyond what I know, are the images I shot to be cleaver or to be special or to be good. In my own struggle on my path, I often miss what is most beautiful, but with your help as friends and advisors, I see things I have never seen before. The journey is more interesting than it was without you.

 

 

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