Black & White Mood
In a bleak, black and white mood all day. Finally pulled myself together, threw on clothes and coat and went out for awhile. Went to the dollar store and found a book on Joni Mitchell, her early career, which I look forward to reading.
Then I went for a drive north of town. Sometimes when life is upsetting the best thing I can do is grab the cameras and get out, go for a walk, go for a drive. it takes me out of myself, quiets the mind, focuses the attention, calms the spirit. I focus on what I'm looking at, looking/seeing for a long time before releasing the trigger. I let go out what's been bothering me, and the only thing that fills me mind is what I'm looking at. It can approach the no-mind focused attention of meditation. It has saved me more than once, just to get out, lose myself in the making, put everything else on hold for awhile.
I mostly shot B&W all afternoon, but when the sun went behind these rims of cloud, turning amber-gold, I had to shoot it in color.
Labels: monochrome photography, personal essay, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 7:28 PM
4 Comments:
That's the way to do it sometimes, Art, go outside of yourself, look around you for a while. You are fortunate you have such photographic skills that you can capture something through your camera lens that turns the bleak into the beautiful. But I'm sorry to hear you're feeling low. May it pass.
Thanks. This all helped, a bit.
My wife’s bought me two cameras in the hope that I might start going out for walks and taking snaps like I used to do when I was a kid not that I took too many back then because I had to make every photo count and I’m afraid that mentality is hard to shake. But I don’t seem to be able to get enthusiastic about anything when I’m out and I rarely travel very far from home these days. In fact the only thing I’ve taken any photos of with my new camera (the DSLR) is me I think and that’s only because I felt I needed photos for my website. When Carrie was in America she asked me to send her a couple of snaps of the bird’s ‘castle’ – the arrangement of boxes and ladders I build every morning atop his cage – to show her mum who also has cockatiels but the battery was dead and when I charged it overnight it still wouldn’t work; I’ve not looked at it since. It will probably lie for months before I think about it. At the moment its doubling as a bookend.
I know that the bear likes his cave, and I'm still going to vote with Carrie on this one. A bookend? There's something deeply ironic about that.
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