Emotions are high…this morning. It is a beautiful morning here. Unseasonably warm. The chickens are happy. The bees are happy. They do their chicken and bee jobs. I wrote last night that the work does not change. Temperance, magnanimity, prudence. Keep going.
DK Photo. Sunrise. 6:40 a.m. November 6 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More amazing sunrise looks from yesterday here.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one’s health and it were constantly one station ahead—I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
As an obsessed amateur photographer […] I scrolled through my own collection of photographs. I have roughly ten thousand stored in Adobe Lightroom (the program I use to edit my photos), and thousands more squirrelled away on various hard drives and cloud services. I also have boxes of prints and binders of film negatives here and there. Although I’ve been photographing seriously since my twenties, the pace of my production has increased markedly since I’ve had kids; I’m now adding a little more than two thousand pictures a year to my archive. This suggests that, by the time I’m eighty, I’ll have about a hundred thousand photos in my hoard—three times as many as are held by the Museum of Modern Art. […]
I’m no Sally Mann or Steve McCurry, and yet I’m amassing an expansive visual account of my life. My pictures are well considered, and made with fancy equipment, and even with some imaginative and physical effort—it’s not so easy to photograph a water-gun fight in the pool!—but they are fundamentally ordinary. Photographs don’t have to be art: in a recent book, the critic Nathan Jurgenson explored the rise of “social photos”—the immediately sharable dressing-room selfies, appetizer snapshots, and view-from-the-hotel-balcony landscapes that aren’t meant to be art works but are, instead, “about developing and conveying your view, your experience, your imagination in the now.” But, even though I share some of my photos with family and friends, they aren’t social. They’re made for broadly artistic reasons, even though they’re just everyday photographs.[…]
So, by taking photographs, I’ve found out what the world looks like. I imagine that even people with keen eyesight might experience something similar. Photographs, even mundane ones, pause and magnify. They let us look, and look, and look at what our roving eyes pass over. And we often pass over everyday things—which is why it can be fascinating to find out what your coffee mug, or your cat, or your own face looks like at just the right time of day. […]
Although I have thousands and thousands of photos, my life doesn’t encompass thousands and thousands of people and places. The result is that I’ve photographed the same people, places, and kinds of light repeatedly, for many years. Taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence. Every evening, on the way home from work, I pass the same red-and-white fire hydrant, which is set into some reedy bushes on a little promontory overlooking a harbor. I often stop to take a picture of it: its red registers as warmer in summer and cooler in winter, and its white adopts the yellow of scorched grass in late summer and fall. People’s faces also change with the seasons: photographing my family on the lawn can be difficult in summertime, because the strong light reflecting off the grass can give their complexions a greenish cast, lessened only at what photographers call “golden hour”—that time in the late afternoon when the sun casts an amber glow. Warm or cold, green or yellow, and bluish-white in winter: these sorts of ambient colors change cyclically, through all four seasons. […]
All of which is to say that, no, your great-great-grandchildren won’t care about your photographs (or much else that you do); no, it isn’t entirely sensible to take thousands of pictures of your life (or to undertake many of the projects that captivate us); and, no, you’re not likely to wring transcendence out of the mundane on a regular basis. You can, however, learn something about yourself and your world by doing or attempting to do these things. Even amateur hour becomes golden hour, sometimes.
The older I get, the less tolerance I have for affectation or insincerity in all things. It is why I am drawn closer to nature, family, and tradition. Give me the earnest, the true, the real.
Twilight to Sunrise @ low tide. Time Lapse 6:00 to 7:40 am. 100 minutes in 23 seconds. 44° F. October 19, 2024. Cove Island Park. Stamford, CT. What’s your favorite? #1 or #2? (And then I’ll disclose what equipment produced which video.)
