REAWAKENING TO LIFE

Appalachia. (Big Meadows, VA) – Mountain top experience, with the Love. And nowhere to go except up. Canon 5D Mk2, Leica 21mm f/4. 

Drift (Hualien, Taiwan) – I could photograph driftwood all day – seriously, drop me off at a beach, and I will be a happy camper. This was a nice little find among the sandstone cliffs and bright blue sea. Canon 5D Mk2, Leica 21mm f/4.

The Ugly Sheep Judges You! (McClure, PA) – Anybody know the reference here? If you do, you have spent hours upon days upon weeks watching a sitcom, just like me. Anyway, this is one of my favorite shots from the farm shoot! This sheep was not happy I was taking pictures of his… harem?… sitting directly behind him. Canon 5D Mk2, Canon 50mm f/1.4.

Another Look (Green Lane, PA) – A shot from this weekend’s afternoon hike around the park near my parents’ house in eastern PA. This is one of my favorite portraits taken so far with the 50mm f/1.4 lens (and coincidently, it’s of my favorite person!). Canon 5D mk2 and the Canon 50mm f/1.4 wide open.

So I am really committing to at least one picture a day. I know how often healthy New Year’s Resolutions are forgotten with donuts and cheeseburgers, but I will really try to keep this going with quality images and decent capture notes. My backlog of unseen pictures is staggering, so I want to try to get them out into the sunlight for you to see. Please tell your friends. :D

My past excursion was up to the fine countryside of New Hampshire with the cycling club from PSU. It was a crazy experience, since it was 10 hours EACH WAY. We stopped once on the way home, which turned out to be a bad thing. My hamstring was so sore from the mountain biking and sitting cramped up in a van, my butt was extremely angry with me. It was as hard as a rock Monday, which wouldn’t be a bad thing… it just involved a lot of pain.

I have been spending a lot of time in my head lately. It has been really good to reflect on these past few months, and what I am hoping to see in the next few. I am surprised at the ‘freshness’ I now see State College with – since I have admitted to staying and relaxing and stopped lusting after people’s situations in other places, I have become… happy.

Thats’s right. Not that I am becoming complacent with my situation or becoming uninspired or saying ‘all is right with the world,’ but simply saying, “Yes. This is where I am supposed to be right here, right now.” I haven’t given up on my dreams of Africa and NYC or trying to get to all seven continents, but I am content to say that God has me tight, and he knows my heart.

These are the simple things that I have forgotten over the past few years. The simple love that is made so available to us, we often try to make it so much more complicated than it really is. Simply, so sweetly simply, we are loved, and he has us right where he wants us.

Holga and HP5.

I strangely like this image – aside from it being very dark, it encapsulates the feeling of walking in the woods and coming upon a clearing.

Purposing a time to be purposeless, to wander, to seek out what you don’t know, yes, this is a valuable and necessary time. To eat the locusts and the wild honey, to be tested and to force yourself to become hungry, to admit to faults and imperfections covered over by the business of computers and money and speed – this is the desert, the wilderness. 40 days or 40 years, whatever it may be will be.

Holga. Hp5. Waterfall. Red filter. Lots of contrast.

Personally, life has taken a bit of a turn lately. I know I am in the midst of a change of path, as I have left a church I have been a part of for the last seven years. I know its a drop in the bucket versus someone who has been in a church for their lifetime, but their influence on me has left an indelible impression on my spiritual genes. My only regret is… well… I really don’t have any that I can think of at the moment. I will let you know if any come out.

However, I am looking forward to this time without bonds or responsibilities in that sense, and to really see what I am spiritually without all the swirling politics of a church. Back to basics. Please. Panera on Sunday mornings sounds great to me.

Ilford HP5 with the Ansco Speedex R – a great pair of horses across the street from my work. Somehow they figured out how to jump the electric fence and run around our property. I figured it was only fair that I get some frames of them. She only charged at me once.

I finally figured out how to scan in the edges of the frame. I usually do not crop my images, so I like to print all the way out to the border, showing the frame and make of the film. Mmmm….

Shot on HP5 with a Holga, left the roll out in the sun in my car, and kept it loaded in a developing tank for a month… I do bad things to film.

Purposed wanderings yield better prints and expanded minds. If I don’t find what I am supposedly looking for, I am confident that it will find me.

Two posts today – lucky you.

Taken in Rothrock with an Ansco Speedex R on HP5 – a $5 buy at a fleamarket. I am a fan of the out-of-focus spins you get in the background and foreground of the image, which a lot of the old lenses have at their full aperture.

A reinterpretation of a natural scene – I feel that photography and camera/lens design has always tried to capture *exactly* what the scene is, and the image quality was limited by the technology of that day when the camera was produced. I think very few cameras are designed to give the images it captures a special look, like designing a lens that purposely creates a spinning blur. I think about my Canon SLR which is designed for very little image distortion and accurate color reproduction, and I feel that most of the images that are produced striaght from that camera are stale/sterile in comparison to a camera that uses inferior lenses that were made several decades ago.

I feel that photography will never be able to faithfully reproduce what we see in real life, so why try so hard to? Take images that reinterpret the scene and choose a camera/lens in the same way you would choose a paintbrush for a particular texture.