Excuses, excuses - Tina Edition
Don’t let my running all around the world fool you, I’m a kid who spent his early teens growing up in the 70’s, which means I’m a master of the art of just hanging out. Despite what people may tell you, it’s a lot more than just doing nothing. It’s an art, one that I have perfected after much, much practice (surely more than the 10,000 hours some say is necessary to master an art). Some might say it’s just another excuse for being lazy. I’m honest enough to say they might be right. Anyway, that’s pretty much my state of inertia. A body at rest wants to stay at rest.
So what do I do to get myself to be productive? To go from a body at rest to a body in motion? Or, to put it more bluntly, what do I do to motivate myself to get off my ass and do something?
Excuses! Simply put, sometimes I feel like I need an excuse to do even the things I love. Or at least to make it a priority so that it gets done. Call it a life hack to make space for the things I enjoy doing.
Now we all know that life piles on way more than most people should have to handle. As I’ll often say that, much like a vampire, life wants to suck away all your free time. At least until you’re so exhausted that you really just want to relax in the little free time you have left instead of doing something you love like . . . photography. You have to constantly fight life just to live. I know, it sucks, but that’s the way it is. Life doesn’t care.
So I’ve found a way to place the things I love higher on the to-do list so that I actually do them. How? By jumping on every possible opportunity to make it something I “have to do.” I would call it a burden, but it isn’t other than it means that other things are now “less important” and are condemned to not getting done this weekend. Too bad.
How does this play out in real life? It usually begins something like this: someone says, “Hey, Dan, you do photgraphy! Could you . . . ?” That’s when they ask for a favor. Photography becomes an excuse to do something for someone else, and that’s a good thing right? One should make it a priority to help friends and family out! I do want to be a nice guy. So what do I do? I jump on the opportunity and use it as an excuse to push away things I probably should be doing (like trimming the hedges) to do something I enjoy doing (like developing images).
This has happened a few times recently, so why not blog about it?
Last month when we were in Dallas for Kit’s wedding, Tina held a reception for the two families at her home. It was lovely and the food was delicious. The Guys had even purchased some Black Butte Porter (in Texas of all places) for me to drink. At one point I look over and see Ann and Tina in deep conversation over by her foyer where the stairs wind up to the second floor. Curious, I walk over to see what the discussion is about. And then it happens . . . I’m paraphrasing, but Tina said, “I was just talking with Ann about the fact I’ve got this huge blank wall up there and I haven’t been able to find any photographs that would really work there. I was wondering if the two of you might want . . . .?” Bingo! In short - black and white images she can use to decorate her wall. Probably urban type images (because that’s what she has elsewhere in her house), but really anything we think might work. Now, it’s a huge wall, so that means something that might look good very, very large, or several images in combination printed large that would look good. Or . . . well, that’s not for me to decide. Tina gets to make the decoration decisions. All I have to do is pick out some images.
In summary, I now have an excuse to dig through my images and find black and white images that might work. And to convince Ann to go through her images because, despite her protestations otherwise, I’m not the only one pressing a shutter in the household. Or making images that deserve to be seen. The fortunate thing was, Tina first asked Ann, and Ann promised. And we all know how guilt can kick in with Ann!
Flash forward a few weeks and . . . I’ve totally forgotten about the conversation (I blame it on work and other things that have popped up - I swear I would have remembered at some point). But not Ann. On one of my work-break trips down to her office I see a lovely black and white image on her monitor taken from our trip to Madeira. “Wow, that looks great! Why did you pick that image to work on?” “Oh, remember, I promised Tina I’d send her some images to maybe print for her house?” “Oh, we did … oops!”
I told her the image she was working on (just above) would look amazing printed large, very large and it was excellent for a large print in a 2-story space. It was a definite for the list.
So I started the process of working through my images, because we wouldn’t want to disappoint Tina. We’d made a promise. It was a great excuse to spend some free time and a couple of weekends going through old work to find suitable images. Ann was worried we’d only have a dozen or so worth sending her. By the time I got done, well, I think we clocked out at 90-plus images in the folder for Tina to check out. Maybe that’s a bit of overkill, but variety is the spice of life and options are always good.
I’ll be honest that the images I think would look best printed very large are Ann’s. She does grand landscapes so well. A couple days after I saw the image above, I found the image below on her monitor. “We need to send that one too. It’s awesome!”
I started out by going through my catalogs looking for images that I’d already worked on in black & white. But that didn’t stop me from occasionally stopping at a color image and developing it further if I thought it might be striking hanging on a wall as a black & white print.
Now, Tina did say she wanted urban images but . . . come on, we do landscape work. And I said as much to her, so I didn’t feel guilty including a lot of landscape images, ranging from distant landscapes like the ones above, to more intimate images.
My guiding principle was whether I thought the image would make for a good black and white print large, and occasionally small (who knows what Tina would want to do with them?). Fortunately, I was able to draw upon some of the images I’d printed before, like this one below, that I knew would print well.
And of course, with me, some of the images border on the edge of “graphic” . . .
. . . and others are just downright “graphic” . . .
. . . if not abstract.
Who knows what might strike Tina’s fancy?
I also didn’t forget some of the collections of images I’d already printed. So I included a few images from our drive through the Palouse in Washington . . .
. . . as well as a few images from my Sand and Sky portfolio I know can look interesting in black and white.
But I did have marching orders and I’m only a bit of a rebel, so I included a hearty dose of architectural images. Naturally, I could not ignore the grain huts of Soãjo.
And as with the landscape images, my goal was to provide Tina with a variety of images, from grand cityscapes . . .
. . . to more intimate street scenes.
And given where we’ve lived the past few years, most of the urban images have a distinctly European flavor.
While many of the images were more traditional in character, I had to include some of the images that were more enjoyable for me to make and develop.
And just because it’s an urban environment doesn’t mean the image can’t be abstract.
Overall, I think Tina has quite a range of images to select from. Probably more than her one wall needs. But who cares - she can use all of them if she wants and decorate other walls too!
All she has to do is let us know which ones she wants large, printable files for and we’ll forward them. The rest is up to her.
It was, one might say, a mighty fine excuse to “have” to work on images!