Pause

“I’d rather see a mediocre photograph that makes me feel something than a perfect photograph that makes me feel nothing,”

- Jim Estrin, New York Times photojournalist/teacher.

I'm passionate about watching birds, I'm not a "ticker", I'm horrible at conserving details, maybe because details kept are far less engaging than details experienced. In fact, that often reveals details are the experience. Looking deep within often enables me to see far beyond. Droplet convexes, feather prisms, scale reflections, leaf translucency, a world of Light between, below and beyond, each rewarding a future creation, but so easily missed in a casual glance.

Birds are everywhere, and cause me to pause.

53 Years of Learning to Learn

p.s. The simplest things in the world take us the furthest distances.

Today is my birthday, my half-way point. My compass swings round 180.
Je suis encore béni avec un sens d'aventure.

I've recently returned from Washington DC and the late autumn countryside west up the Potomac River, into West Virginia. Changing environments for the eyes is like being a kid and opening a new box of crayolas - the eyes dance, I feel their excitement, they flit about every new scene, they are almost exhaustingly alive.

Peak fall color was two to three weeks ago. The countryside is now quiet, windshield travelers all back to the city. I can walk sections of the Appalachian trail without a single human interruption, save my own thoughts. Light is also quiet - Light without direction, from every direction. A walk in the forest is a muted journey from the rust and sable and Dijon end of the crayola pack - silhouettes cast against seamless sky.

My walk feels like that of a small child with his first bike and training wheels; it is a new approaching winter for me, for my eyes, I usually flee the cold, the damp, the lifeless, in winter, this time I'm staying, I'm wobbling and learning to pedal in a new Light.

Liguid Light

A few days ago fall shifted gears, cool dampness replaced crisp sun, and then the final act began, rain returned.

In that window between the two, when the season tide within fall runs slack, there is a chance to see the world differently here. Every deciduous tree and shrub is cast in autumnal hues - their time is measured by the rains - and that clock decides how the colors will pass -

some melt,
some run,
some freeze for a fleeting moment, like an exhalant breath of summer.

This year the rains began in the day, there was Light to show the way and color to paint the path.

The Light of stars

How does one express the Light from stars? Insipid flecks of hydrogen gas burning bright beyond our dreams.

Riding my bike the other day, lovely warm last day of summer sun flooding down on me, a quiet country road open and empty, inviting wandering thoughts, I thought about Light, the gift of a star.

Earth is of that energy, that Light, to its very core. Deep inside burns all the stuff of stars. Eventually it too needs to be release back into the grand vastness of space.

The forests around me were lit with big leaf maple leaves soaking and radiating Light, giving it back to my eyes as much as fueling the factory of photosynthesis - "Lightwork" if you will.

I thought about this Light, hidden Light, unexpected Light?

I rode further and thought of this image from Lake Natron, in the Great Rift Valley of Tanzania. The bottom of Natron is volcanic rock, where soda minerals meet and dissolve into water. The surface of Natron is under the intense and ever bearing Light of our star - water evaporates at a rate of up to 1,500mm each year, quadruple the replenishing rains. Soda concentrates on Natron's skin and a network of cracks consume the surface. As if Light were releasing skyward.

On Inspiration

"I don't want to declare there are no highways of fruitful directions. In learning there are. Follow them, use them and forget them. Don't park. Highways will get you there, but I tell you, don't ever try to arrive. Arrival is the death of inspiration."
~ Ernst Hass

Walking back, looking forward

Over the past several days, while a bit under-the-weather, sequestered from the world, I have begun my walking with Light, but have begun the journey trying to see more clearly the path I have traveled thus far. Much more than just reviewing my images, I'm extracting from old personal journals and trying to re-experience the events, moments and emotions surrounding portfolios, essays and individual creations. It's an initially daunting journey - I've created well over a hundred thousand edited images - yet it may be the only first walk possible and in the end most critical.

Beginnings

This project, A walk with Light, is in its infancy, embryonic is perhaps more accurate, other than it has been germinating for most of my life. So why now? It was inspired by a number of events and perambulations, but one in particular gave it life, below from a blog entry called Falling Light:

"When I was very young in my to-be-a-photographer journey my friend Ernst Haas had a stuccatoed monologue with me one afternoon, what I wrote down from it later was - 'Go for a walk one day with the light, you will come back changed'".