Drempt in color (Small post. No purpose…except it made me smile.)

I keep wanting to give up on color, to fall into the black and white and grey of shape and form.

 

Unfortunately, I keep dreaming in color.

 

And every time I close my eyes, I end up dreaming.

xb.

 

 

Two sides of a spinning coin, lost and then found again (why I photograph)

 

This is a small moment.  A moment for seeking solace and providing comfort.

I had forgotten this moment.  In my mind it went unrecognized…through my lens it was fuzzy and fleeting in low light and high emotion.

I am lucky my finger was heavy that night on the shutter, because to me this forgotten, insignificant second is essential.

These moments make us who we are.  These moments remind me that sometimes I am the crying child, sometimes I am the strong arms that comfort.  If I had never been held, I would not know how to hold on.

These moments are so small, I forget them.  I often stand paralyzed with all that has ever happened and been forgotten…there are so many of these small moments, it overwhelms me.

This is why I photograph.

xb.

The art of (self)necromancy and the issue of being glad

‘Mum, we’re playing a game where you can be anyone that you want to be and have anything you want to have.  What do you want to be?’ – Question from the 8yo last weekend.

I wanted to be a dark elf sorceress.  Then I wanted to be a huntress, clad in a fitted bodice and armed with a bow and arrow…or maybe a medic or an apothecary or perhaps just the princess with a dark secret…

Then I wanted to be a ranger, just because they’re cool.

The 5 year old said that I could just be a citizen if I wanted.  I didn’t just want to be a citizen…how boring is that?

In the end, I decided I didn’t know who or what I wanted to be and gave up trying to play.  I realized I was driving and figured I should probably focus on that.  Right now, I’m not sure where I was driving to…I can’t remember but the boys changed their conversation and were having a marvelous discussion about the outer rim.  Apparently it is uncontrolled space.

I had a shoot this week on Wednesday evening.  A friend’s son and his girlfriend were visiting home from college and I was asked to do some couple pictures.  We went to a little park near my friend’s house where the playground looks like a boat and I tried to get them to act like pirates, but they didn’t buy into it.  In fact, there is probably some question as to my sanity in general, I hope it doesn’t get back to the little file that determines my future opportunities.  I picture a huge filing room with everyone’s ‘permanent record’ and a grouchy librarian who sits in a little pool of light from the bare bulb hanging above their hunched shoulders.  The light swings slightly in a non-existent draft as it hangs from the ceiling of an impossibly huge room that generates its own weather systems.

Anyway, it rained Wednesday afternoon and I was very worried about lighting.  It’s been a little while since I had a shoot for someone else and I always, constantly, worry about what they will think about my photography (and about themselves in it).  I have previously explained my difficulty shooting by other’s rules and I have also previously explained my difficulty in communicating my needs and feelings, which is kind of essential when you are directing people to sit, turn, smile, not smile, sit up straight, look at each other and act like pirates.

I only remembered at the end of the shoot that my friend’s son is studying photography at college.  At least he had the good grace not to ‘talk shop’.  Perhaps he knew I wouldn’t have any good answers if he tried.  My low end camera probably gave me away from thirty yards.  All in all though, the shoot went pretty well.  The light was not spectacular but it was decent and the rain held off once I got there to after I got home.

Earlier in the week (maybe Monday?) I was sitting in my friend’s office (the one with the son and the shoot) eavesdropping.  By this I don’t mean any malicious undertaking.  I promise.  I was just sitting waiting when something she said crept into my conscious interest.

She was explaining to someone else – I am kind of struggling to remember the details here, it was several days ago and like I said, I wasn’t really listening to the whole conversation.  Anyway, she was saying something about her son’s 5 year plan and his 10 year plan.  I said, ‘I don’t even have a 5 year plan!’  She gave me a look like the look she gives me when I bring her charts at 16:45.  The ‘Are you serious?’ look.  Then I said I did have a 5 year plan.

Of course.

I’ve just…misplaced it.  Or more rightly, I have let the finances and the crazy of late let it slip to the proverbial back burner.  Besides, I don’t think dark elf sorceress is something you can train for.  You’re just kind of born into the role.  If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you will know and rightly point out that nursing is my ultimate goal.  It is and in an ideal world I would be there in 5 years.  Assisting deliveries or perhaps running a clinic for under privileged children…in an ideal world, I would have already gotten there though, wouldn’t I?

I do believe I am having a midlife crisis.  I am not sure.  My therapist hasn’t called me back to reschedule my appointment.  Perhaps she would be able to tell me, but then, perhaps it is not any different than any other crisis of life that I have had.

So, I finished reading Pollyanna.  I finished last week and have been intending to write all about it but I picked up the Hunger Games and writing in the face of such readability has been too much to deal with.

I’m sure that I’ve read Pollyanna before.  I remember a red covered book, well tattered and smelling a bit of mold.  I knew the story; however, I didn’t remember the end.  I got half way through before I realized this.  I wonder if I actually ever finished it or just got halfway through and made up the rest.  This is perhaps one of the wonderful side effects of AD/HD.  You can do something several times (even completing the task), each time only paying attention partly and each time it will still seem somewhat new.  How’s that for being glad?  …but I’m skipping ahead.

Honestly, the whole story is a little bit creepy.  Even if you put in a filter of 1913, when the book was first published.  It is still a little bit nefarious.  At one point the older male character, Mr Pendleton, says to the young girl:

‘And, oh, little girl, little girl, I want you so!’

Oh, but I suppose I should explain the story if you have no idea what I’m on about.  At this rate, I’ll have you wondering what sort of books I read.

Pollyanna was written by Eleanor H Porter and published first in 1913.  It is the story of a young girl who after the death of her minister father, goes to live with her (miserable) spinster aunt.  The girl, Pollyanna, has a unique outlook on life and quickly endears herself to everyone she meets by playing ‘the game’.  The game is something her father taught her to play (as she describes many times in the book) when she received crutches in the missionary barrel instead of a doll.  There are some nice little plot twists that creep up on you and some side plots that flesh out the early 20th century world.  The mentioning of crutches again and again is in no way a subtle foreshadowing device and the story ends rather abruptly with everything being alright in the end.

There were no zombies or vampires and there was no outer rim exploration or dark elf sorceresses.

As I mentioned before there are several kind of questionable relationships and there were no zombies; however, the book is oddly endearing.  Perhaps because I grew up with it (or I think I did) and because I have made Pollyanna’s idea of looking at the bright side of things so much a part of my psyche that I have named myself after her character.  I also can’t get over the fact that if the book had been written today, it most certainly would have been banned in some Southern states.  It makes me wonder about all of those Road Runner cartoons that I watched when I was little and the agonizing I do about the things the boys watch today.

In any case, I was not an English major, I don’t intend to break down the characters or the plots or subplots.  Though, I am certain that Pollyanna had AD/HD.  The evidence is hard to dismiss.

I enjoyed reading the book primarily because every page brought up another reason for a character to be glad.  So, Pollyanna didn’t get a doll in the missionary barrel, she got crutches instead.  The game made her realize that she could be grateful for the fact that she didn’t need the crutches.  In everything she tried to make people understand that they could be grateful for what they had, even if it wasn’t great, because it always could be worse.

And it can always be worse people.

My midlife crisis looming, I am trying to once again resurrect the ‘glad’ in my life.  I do wish that the glad game had another name though, as I can only think of Glad trash bags and the ‘wimpy, wimpy, wimpy…hefty, hefty, hefty’ adverts that weren’t about Glad trash bags at all, I don’t think, but about Hefty trash bags.

I will never be a dark elf sorceress/apothecary/ranger (not in this universe anyway – I might be one tomorrow, cos we’re playing D&D) but I will, 5 years from now or not, be a nurse.  I will be in a position to make an impact on other’s well being.  Even if I am not a nurse now, I can still make a positive impact on people’s lives.  Even if I can’t convince anyone to act like they are a pirate, the couple liked their pictures.  Even if I don’t have a specific 5 year plan, I am MILES away from where I was 5 years ago…waitressing in a fake Irish Pub on a small town mainstreet and making less than I spent a week on petrol.

Life is good, really.

xoxo.

(I will/have posted the pictures from the shoot Wednesday at greyhandcraft.wordpress.com, if you’d like to have a look.)

I keep forgetting the passions

 

 

Remember Life is Good

Little thorny Popsicles and a giddy feeling

I cannot exactly explain why, but this picture makes me giddy… absolutely, ridiculously happy.  I decided to turn off the automatic focus.  How daring, I thought sarcastically, but it has made all the difference to my interest level.  I have fallen out of love with this camera, the clunky, wanna be that it is because it is too slow and does too many things by itself like there is a little genie inside that likes to play Texas hold ’em.  I bought the thing because I wanted a shinier digital camera that was reasonably priced and made me feel less like a tourist and more like a photographer.  I have felt (absurdly) that I need to use all its bells and whistles to make ‘good’ pictures.  Well, as of my last post, I explained that I am no longer playing by anyone else’s ‘ideal photography’ rules.  This is the result.  The camera came out when I walked the two miles to pick up my car (AAARGH, it was only $807.00 to fix it, a mere trifle, a drop in the bucket, a quarter of our monthly salary, and the bonus I give our imaginary maid once a quarter so that she can get a little something for her self…) and this is the result.

A crack.  Teeheehee.

This is my ‘White Picket Fence’…It is a little bit worse for wear, doesn’t actually go anywhere and is surrounded by dead grass and thorny Popsicle weeds.

Welcome to my world.

My parents bought me my first camera when I was fourteenish.  A beautifully heavy antique at the time, the OM-1 was my very first love.  When I took it to the UK 12 years ago, it broke.  After mourning, I took it to shop after shop and was told again and again that it would cost more to fix than it would to replace.  ‘Besides,’ they said, ‘film is so yesterday.’    You cannot REPLACE a beauty like that, nor can you rip it apart to see if you can fix it yourself – it would be too akin to an autopsy for me.  I wanted to scream at them that the camera itself was ‘yesterday’ before it came to me but they didn’t listen to the voices in my head.  They sold me instead a clunky digital that was so slow that as soon as you came inside on a sunny day, a worm moved too fast for you to capture it.

I have been through a series of cameras since then.  None as good as that first OM-1…but what ever is?  This latest one I bought because it reminded me of that classic film goddess.  (The song line ‘You can’t call it cheating, cos she reminds me of you’ comes to mind.)  In embracing my passions (number four), I have decided to let the ‘ideal’ go:  camera, brightness and contrast and whatever else tells me that tells me that it’s just not as good as it used to be.  Passion is meant to be a little raw, uncontrolled and a little bit messy, is it not?

xb.