I have to say, I’m loving this visual diary. Run, bike, book. I’m not saying this is a GOOD visual diary. I’m just saying it’s enjoyable to think about sharing the behind-the-scenes of what is happening in my life. I won’t share all of it, regardless of what I say in this film, but I will share some of the relevant things. Paddle, explore, photograph, teach, travel, etc. Fish? Hook kicks? This series is also a way for me to learn filmmaking without having to worry about an overall message specific to a certain film. The reality is, my filmmaking skills SUCK, and this actually bothers me. I need and want to improve because I can’t yet make what I see in my mind. One of the stops on my upcoming trip will put me with someone who is a DaVinci expert. He’s bent on getting me up to speed on DaVinci and on my way to becoming a middle-aged, YouTube wannabe. Wish me luck. The van is fueled, I have a day-by-day plan and I need to be somewhere else.
Comments 8
Format works ok!!
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Cool
Yea, these videos are good. Please keep doing them.
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More on the way…
“… and I need to be somewhere else.”
Oh boy, have you pricked a fundamental, motivational strand in the soul of a certain type of photographer!
Right through the most productive period of my life – from around the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s – there were times when, with the anxiety of down time ripping through my mind, I’d look up at a passing jet and wonder why the hell I wasn’t back on one, heading to some location where I would be living through the next best paragraph of my life. In the end, it became unclear whether the trip was the real buzz, or the actual photography that provided the income from that trip was the lure. Time didn’t help very much: the addiction became a source for unhappiness much, I guess, as drugs must do for some other people. Maybe photography is no more than just another form of drug: okay if you can keep it recreational, but all-consumingly destructive if you let it take over your life.
Whilst it has never made me feel this way, I do understand why so many of us have called out enough, and just walked away from life in some dismal act of termination. I do wish that I could find out how other people who led fully professional photographic careers coped with retirement; it seems to me that retirement is really just what we call it when the ‘phone stops ringing. Nope; buying a ticket to wherever on your own account doesn’t count: it’s got to be commissioned in order to mean anything at all. Just another thing that money can’t buy.
You don’t have to be a youtuber to be driven nuts by those inner voices; I guess the only thing worse is having no inner voices at all.
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For me, I loved it when the phone stopped. In fact, I made it stop. I felt I could then get on with being the real me.
Thing is, the real me – as I suspect, the real you – isn’t a constant. The real me who craved that ringin’ ‘phone ain’t the me to appear out of the silence around five years later. Boredom makes its own changes to the personality, and on top of that, personal economics also have a habit of getting in the way or, perhaps, opening new ways instead. I suppose that change is the only constant upon which we should bet the ranch.
Frankly, a problem that I find arising from amateur status is lack of clear direction: when everything free is freely available, nothing becomes important. It’s my contention that in something as relatively unimportant as photography, one requires some external pressure for any particular thing to become truly gripping. There’s not a lot of incentive where one realises that perhaps it doesn’t make any real difference to anything or anyone – including oneself – whether one makes an image or not. That’s where a client comes in and gives impetus, adds a very clear importance to what one is doing. It’s a bit like driving: when you can, there’s little point in doing it unless you have to, or need to go somewhere in particular. I can think of few adventures less promising than going round and round a track. Or up and down the boulevard, for that matter.
Perhaps the cellphone selfie has more natural, honest validity than any number of self-imposed “projects” that we may give ourselves in order to fool the judge inside us. It’s not enough to love cameras and/or Photoshop. Maybe we embrace false gods.
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False Gods are the norm now. I’m not sure anything we do is honest. The cellphone selfie is a symptom of self-centeredness. Nothin more.