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| My father's WWII B-17 flight log, a wool cap, Derby pigskin covered tobacco pipe and a rabbit's foot. |
It has been several months since I have dusted off my Nikon and taken a long, meandering walk in the woods, but I think I am going to do just that this weekend.
I arose early this morning and got my camera down off of the shelf, dusted it off, charged the batteries and made certain that everything was in perfect working order. I re-shelved it and it is ready for me to take on my first photo adventure in months.
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| A canopy of leaves in a local park. |
Nothing relaxes me more than to go for a long, slow walk through the woods with a camera strap around my neck. So, my plan is to leave my house around daylight Saturday morning walking in whatever direction suits my fancy in search of subjects that appear to need to be photographed. I have no idea how long this trek will take, but it is my intent to stay out until I get enough photos to share a few on this blog. I can not continue for too long because I will have to get back to the house to prepare my kitchen garden for its fall plantings, but while I am wandering, I expect to completely lose myself in the act of enjoying nature, its beauty and its solitude.
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| Late summer mushrooms find footing beneath the pines. |
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| Ribbons of steel bisecting our property on a foggy August morning. |
Why do I love photography so much? It is easy, when I was very young I fell in love with my father's Kodak Signet 35mm rangefinder camera. I used it whenever I was allowed to take shots of the family, our pets, flowers, rocks, horses, or anything else that was still long enough for me to expose a piece of film with their image. After a while I got my own camera and proceeded to nearly break "my bank account" by buying film and developing more images than I could afford. By the time I got to college I was ready to learn more about the art and science of the craft of photography. I took every course available to me as an undergraduate and my love for the art form grew. It was in my freshman year of college that I found that exposing the film was enjoyable, but it was in the darkroom that the magic really happened. In that first year of school I probably spent more time in the darkroom than I did in the sunlight. Soon I discovered that I could spend as many hours as the light would allow outdoors with camera in hand and then spend most of the night developing film and printing photos of the things I had been admiring all day. I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, merely an avid photographer with a some pretty good training so I took good, not great photos. When film began to give way to digital photography I taught myself to use Adobe Photoshop and found it to be almost as intriguing as the darkroom.
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| The country lane leading to our home in the woods. |
While I still have a darkroom full of really good equipment including enlargers, tanks, spools, trays, baths and even old chemicals which I am more than certain are useless except to awaken my memory when I see the yellow and black envelopes containing them, I don't spend time in the dark anymore. I spend what little time I can afford in my busy schedule enhancing photos in Photoshop and sharing them here and there as I can. I even found my old studio flash equipment and will soon pull it out and see if by some stroke of luck it will work after the many years of neglect I have made it endure.
Maybe by Saturday night, I will know if I still have the eye to photograph the mundane and then bring it to life in such a way that others will want to see the images. Now that is done on a computer screen rather than the photographic paper on which I once printed them but hopefully the same ethereal results will remain.
Until next time...
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