Good Habits
I’ve mentioned several times in blog posts over the years that life is a time suck. It will steal from you that which is irreplaceable - time. And it steals relentlessly. You have to fight back, just as relentlessly and tirelessly in order to have time to do what you truly want to do. Finally getting my drivers license removed the roadblock that had mentally been forcing me to mitigate my expectations, but with that gone and a couple of other late 2023 roadblocks overcome, Ann and I are finally positioned to do what we set out to do when we decided to head overseas.
It’s starting out small because it is the middle of winter, but we are getting into the habit of doing photography things every weekend, which of course spills over during the week with all of the odds and ends that come with it. Nevertheless, it’s still photography and photography is good. Most importantly, we’re getting into the photography habit. It’s becoming a priority, something that concerns us almost every single day. And it’s through good habits that we push back against the time suck.
It started before New Years (face it, the time suck has made it hard for me and the blog posts to keep up, but that’s ok and far better than the alternative [anybody have a winning Powerball ticket they want to give us?]), but we’ve managed to get out to photograph, do some printing and start trip planning every weekend. It means that I have to juggle some things during the week, making sure to get them done before the weekend instead of defaulting to the, “Oh, I’ll do it this weekend!” mentality (that’s how the life time suck gets you), and occasionally getting over the end of a mind testing-day of legal writing (and my natural laziness) to get household tasks done to make sure we’re free to do what we want to do on the weekends. It’s not easy, but we’re making it happen.
Like last weekend. We’ve had some pretty rough weather lately, from rain to freezing cold. So when we had a day of little to no rain and reasonable temperatures, we decided to take a short trip to another near-by woods. We didn’t have a particular destination in mind, and definitely had no idea whether we’d find any photographs, but we did. Nothing great, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. And practice is always good, particularly when you’re well out of practice.
I made only two photographs from the excursion, so I’ll show them both. We found an old open storage shed, still in use, but definitely in disrepair, which seemed to be a decent subject. There was plenty of bright green moss, which seemed to contrast nicely with the rust colored leaves on the ground. I found a suitable location to set up the tripod and made an image.
f you’re going to make mediocre images on an outing it helps if you learn from them and I learned from this image. I’d been so concerned about getting the small tree in the foreground, with its leaves (I should have known there would be merger of foreground and background . . . but being able to see that in the field will come), that I reverted to a very wide-angle lens to get it all in (I couldn’t really go backwards because of more trees and a drop off). Well, that really reduced the size of the structure. So much so that it really lost any prominence it had. Oddly, Ann did the same thing with her image (she was way off to my right), she used too wide of a lens for the building. Like I said, things to remember going forward and much better to be reminded of that lesson with an image like this than with one that could have been stunning.
As I was writing this post, I wondered whether the image might be better in black and white, so I went back into Lightroom to develop the image a bit.
No, not really any better. Due to the differences between black and white and color, I was able to create a bit more separation between the tree, the fence behind it and the building. In that way, it’s a bit better, but it definitely loses that green-rust contrast that originally caught my eye.
The second image was a no-brainer for me (what Ann refers to as a “Dan image” and I can’t rightly disagree). I saw it as I was walking to the back end of the building to see if I could get a decent image of the structure itself. I think old Dan would have stopped to make this one first, but I’m still intentionally working on making landscape images instead of just details all the time, so I set it aside for the time being. But there was no way I was going to walk away from this one.
It’s just a nice play of simple forms, textures and color that brings pleasure to my eye.
Seeing the tonal contrasts, I knew it was worth developing it in black and white as well - I would have pulled out my 4x5 for this shot in the old days.
While this looks like a nice black and white image, and would likely print very nicely, I think it is less than the color image. The black and white image, for all its texture, loses the play between the reddish-brown color in the leaf stuck in the window and the green moss of the siding, and is the lesser for it.
Good habits. Getting out on a coolish damp day where it’s easier to stay home warm and dry. Going for a nice walk, toting the camera just in case you see something (realizing just how out of shape you are). And stopping to make images . . . even if they fall a bit short of the excitement you felt while making them. That’s all part of the process. Keep up good habits, stick to the process, and the images will come.
Now to just keep it up!