Creative: Nothing

Do this long enough and you just know. You know when you have something, and you really know when you don’t. Similar settings, similar time, similar ingredients. One camera, one lens. Good light, moody, and with potential action. Out on a boat, just off the harbor front. A slow idle toward the jetty, then a blast into the open ocean. A moment to make pictures, so the internal tension is up. Make it count, you think to yourself, as if making pictures is a switch you flip. Up for unrealistic expectations.

I know it’s not working, so I get desperate and try something futile.

Into the menus. Auto ISO off, then reduce the active ISO to the lowest setting. Stop the lens down to f/16, then attempt to pan a three-masted schooner from a moving boat. A waste of time and pixels. One frame, two, three, four, five, six, and now the exercise is little more than self-torture. Select all, delete, feels like too much work, and yet I keep shooting.

Back into the menus. Find multiple exposure settings. Turn on, select a maximum of two exposures. Keep shooting. No, no, no, no, no. Back into the menu, select a maximum exposure of four. Keep shooting. No, no, no, no, no. Dumbass. Desperation. Maybe just sit here and take in the view. The sliver moon is out. The horizon is a combination of bluish purple perfection. The surface of the ocean is black and foreboding. Gulls and cormorants buzz the center console. “Here they come, Dan,” someone says, knowing my proclivity to look a flying objects. I’m cold.

Everyone moves to the back as the captain jams on the stick, and we rocket back toward the harbor. I crawl to the bow and attempt to shoot long, multiple exposures, perhaps the most futile gesture in the history of imagemaking. At one point, I had to turn the camera off to end the agonizing exposure. I think of the positive. I didn’t fall in. I don’t have a rash. No one cut the fuel line, and so far, the boat has not exploded in a fireball of human jelly and Boston Whaler parts.

As we idle back toward the dock, I frame up subpar image after subpar image. Nothing works. I feel like I’ve never framed anything. I shoot pictures I know I don’t want. I shoot pictures no one would want. “Did you get some good shots?” someone asks, innocently. “I only take selfies,” I reply. “So every single picture I make is a five-star gem for the world,” I add, winking at the person. They look puzzled, then saddened, then embarrassed, for me.

It’s not that I don’t like it when I fail so easily, when nothing I try works. It happens a lot. It always has, and based on the infrequency of my picture taking, I’m assuming this will continue unabated. It’s annoying more than anything else, but I do appreciate the fact I can tell when it’s happening, which means each moment is more agonizing than it should be. I like challenges. I was never a superstar at anything, so failure and its acceptance have been part of my life since I tried throwing up in the car to avoid swimming lessons.

As I return to my rental house, the landlord’s cat sits outside the back door with an enormous live chipmunk in its mouth. The cat kills something every day, and doesn’t care about my photography. He is impressed with himself and wants me to know the hierarchy. He on top, I somewhere lower down. I retreat to my office, drop my kit, and begin reading a book by Mathew McConaughey. He and I were at UT Austin at the same time. He went one way, I went another.

The book reminded me of a conversation I had with my parents before they crossed the rainbow bridge. My father was near the end. His sharp head for business was gone, and he found himself losing money in a classic multi-level marketing scheme, one of the big ones you all know about. The conversation, however, was about Hugh Hefner. My mother, being the prude she was, said, “Well, Hefner wants you to think his life is so great, but I’ll bet it’s not.” She then went on to say how great my life and my dad’s life were at that time. “Ya, right,” my father said. “Let me see.” “Choose between spending all day in your pajamas surrounded by beautiful women who all want to have sex with you, or spend all day selling “X” out of your basement.” “Sounds like a tough decision.”