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I am seeing a lot of gift guides pop up for the holiday season and I got to thinking about what I would like to give and receive at about anytime of the year. So once again I am about to tell you a little bit about how my world is ordered. It won’t become a habit I promise and yes it does have a photography related point.
After years of books on people like Brancusi or Noguchi for the holiday gifts Ryan (my son) returned to college and of course money got tight. So we decided to use the whole ‘make me think’ thing for gifts. Now I see a lot of things listed by other photographers that I would love to have to make the making of images easier or because it just is cool stuff. However I would always rather have ideas or something that keeps me thinking for the rest of the year. So below are gifts from the last two years from Ryan.
The first is a framed typewritten page telling what my gift was and how to keep it. To date I am the only graduate of the school he enrolled me in.
Text of the gift:

Dear Dad,
This November I enrolled you in an advanced Ninja Training
Seminar. You are the only survivor, as the Nnjas killed everyone they
found when taking roll call. You have passed with high marks, having
remained  undetected. This is the last of a series of courses they
have not caught you attending. Congratulations!

Invitations to future post graduate seminars will be sent to you
encrypted in the form of software glitches, bugs and programming
code that doesn’t work. If you maintain the high level of excellence
that has marked your training so far, the Dragon Clan Ninjitsu
Training Academy and Institute of Obfuscation will honor your
achievements by removing all trace of your enrollment from their
records

Keep up the Good Work!

Love Ryan

The second was a Quantum Gift box based on the Heisenberg principle of quantum physics. The photos may make it make sense. I check every few days to make sure my gift isn’t there.

The point as it pertains to Photography is to look around you and see in a new way, give that to those around you. As Mark K says get your camera in a new place, I’d add to do that you need to put your head in a new place. Hanging around new ideas or other creative people will help. Try something totally out there to see what it does or how it makes you see the world.

Give the gift of ideas, knowledge and truth if you are giving to a photographer or any artist. Weekly assignments from the giver written out for the year are good or help getting a show together or help selecting images for a book. Books are always a good gift but maybe they should be books on the why not more of the how. A good place to start is with David duChemin for books on the why of images, but it doesn’t have to be about images it can be about ideas.  Anything that will add to the creative energy or that little push to take things to another place. Besides exercising the creative thought to come up with a gift idea shows the caring much more that looking thru a catalog or list of things.

It doesn’t take money only a little bit of that which we all have, ideas, no amount of gear or money will generate those.

Anyone who stops by here on occasion really should be reading my friend Mark K at JerseyStyle Photography. Mark  always has something to say that is worth reading, I should say almost always because his latest post is an interview with me. I am truly honored to be one of his Sunday Focus guests.

So If you are at all curious about how I would answer a few photography related questions check his blog out and stay for some of the finest Photography that you will find anywhere, especially the noir photos.

Thanks Mark.

Not a lot I feel like adding in words today but I did want to post a little more of the On Black series I am working on.

The Story

About 18 yrs ago I was hurrying to catch a ferry late at night and drove by an apt house that was dark except for the reflection of TV light bouncing off of the ceilings on the upper floors. The light show was so fascinating I drove around the block a couple of times and then parked and watched the light long enough to miss the ferry. One thing about having a ferry system is you get a fair amount of time to think while waiting on them. I got the idea to try and see what those lights would look like in the woods. That weekend was spent going to a lot of garage sales and buying several $5 B&W portable TVs and a lot of extension cords, even got a few donated just to haul them off. Finally ended up with 8 working sets.

The nice thing about having 5 acres of brush and trees and neighbors that already know you are a little out there is you get to do things you want. I scattered the TVs at the end of a bunch of cords back into the woods up and down the main road and turned them all on to different channels, pretty much Canadian channels as that was all I could get on the antenna then waited for dark. It was a pretty good show driving by slowly, with light bouncing around in the trees and out to the road all changing by the second and with no sound or real reference to a TV show. When asked I told folks that I liked TV so I wanted to share it with the squirrels on the property. Left them on for about a month at night, now they don’t ask me much about what I am doing even after all these years.

The Point

When it comes to an idea or a photograph don’t ask someone else what it will look like, go out and try it. There is no substitute for seeing it yourself. Experiment and do the stuff that is really out there you may not get a second chance to try. The forums are full of people asking what and how on what this light does or that light looks like or how do I do this or that. The answers they get are really meaningless without the experience itself. Light never looks the same way twice. I could have let the whole thing go and wondered how cool it would have looked, now I know and so do a few others and that is something that can’t be taken away.

My solution is never going to be your solution and I can’t tell anyone’s story but my own. Fail, fail and fail no one ever learned anything by only knowing success. The whole experience wouldn’t be easy to duplicate now that TV is all digital and not antenna and B&W TVs are a little hard to find. Besides doing the things that pop into your head is the only way to get the voices to talk about something new.

No real story with this image it is from the archives. I woke up this morning thinking about a post I read I believe on Paul Lesters blog about the masks he wears as a father, photographer etc. (I may have read it somewhere else it was a while ago.) Thinking of this image and how I have always seen myself as who I am not what I do and have always cringed when someone describes themselves with a job title.

No image of anyone should limit itself to what they do but try to capture some of who they are. No one image can capture the whole of anyone and shouldn’t. The jobs we do aren’t masks.  Who we are is made up of experiences that will shape how we see and react to the world, jobs and responsibilities are these experiences. The viewfinder is only able to reflect a part of this story on both sides of it.

Part of what is driving this rambling is the images Mark K made on his world jaunt of people in Russia and India. His description of people in Russia not smiling and people in India always smiling hit home for some reason. I guess it is up to us which part of the world we want to live in in our hearts. India for me even if I don’t always show it.

Got a couple of slide shows I will add to this rambling this week if I can and a promise to add more often, I was told that the best way to learn to write is by doing so… Thanks K-man. Check out Marks and Pauls blogs they are well worth the time both for the writing and images which tell a real story. The dogs are telling me “Timmy is in the well” again so more later.