Butcher Shop © 2016
I have no great teachings, I have only great teachers. This humble observation — I forget now where I first heard it — has been bouncing around in my little head all summer long. You’d think with all the stress and social distancing going on, I’d have been more productive, but here we are. And where we are, or at least where I am, is a point in time, after more than half a century of fiddling around in photography, where I should engage with what I’ve learned thus far and pass it on. Well, good luck with that.
I mean, I have spent a lot of time over the years describing such arcana as depth-of-field, hyperfocus, and shutter speed and have come to the conclusion that that only nibbles around the edges of the larger, and stickier, issue of personal expression. No matter what your own means to be creative may be, whether a camera, pastels, pencil & paper, or a guitar, your daily practice of technique must eventually give way to an insistence to create and share. If we’re doing it right, it’s something we’re compelled to do, like breathing, and one way or another we’ve probably been doing it right all along.
This is what others may mean when they talk about the zen of this-or-that, and why I, perhaps a bit presumptuously, think of myself as a zen photographer. And it’s not what you think.
Columbine 2021