Thoughts and Observations
Two snowstorms over the holidays, one on New Years Day. Rare sight for the middle of Albuquerque to see to roads completely covered and impassable. Spent the holiday with a fire in in the fireplace, drink in hand, occasionally looking out the window as the flakes drifted downward. Took a walk in the evening and enjoyed the silence. Not a bad way to start the year.
I’ll be making an effort to expand my photo book library this year, and with Photo-Eye less than an hour drive away, I’m guessing the jones will be easy enough to feed. I picked up a few titles to get the pump primed. I finally purchased a copy of Robert Frank’s The Lines of My Hand. A nice bridge from The Americans to his later work, and the printing by Steidl is outstanding. I also picked up a copy of Takuma Nakahira’s Overflow. Not very familiar with his work, but I read somewhere he was an “arch rival” of Daido Moriyama (who I adore) so I was intrigued to check out some of his work. The layout of this book is jarring, yet I found much inspiration from how the structure of the page spreads were broken from a conventional constraints of “one picture per page” approach. I plan on hijacking this idea for my next self-publishing project, coming sooner than you think.
I finally replaced my “backup” camera. Goodbye to the constraints of iso 1600. If you’re wondering, I bought a Canon T7i (gearheads be damned) with a sweet, ultra wide angle lens. I can’t wait to play with it, and shoot fast and loose, like God intended.
While shaking the cobwebs off of my brain to come up with a project for the year, I contemplated a few ideas. Maybe shoot a different film camera a month, or one roll of film a week for a year. But maybe the most realistic way to stay on some kind of routine is just simply write down my thoughts on a weekly basis. No pressure, no expectations beyond just sticking to this commitment. A tip of the hat to my friend Justin, who is a far better writer than I am; he did a similar thing a couple of year’s back, and I always enjoyed reading what he had on his mind from week to week. So here we go.
