photo-fit-ness
noun
*the condition of being physically fit and healthy while maintaining a skillset required for professional photography.
*maintained by the practice of rapid, experimental compositions, layering and the search for optimal light. This is not about good photography. This is about practice and staying in photographic shape for when real opportunity presents itself.
Comments 15
Enjoyed this!
Care less about the people, front, middle, far. I would have been shooting the rocks and their relationship to the small intermittent puddles. We humans are weird, we project the world in differing ways, and that is the entertaining thing that keeps us on the game board.
Author
I have always been drawn to the peeps. I wish I wasn’t cause rocks are a lot easier than flesh based items.
No body just hit home runs… you have to go out and swing some bats… so you can increase your “luck” getting those photos that “pop up” and then wizz by you like a fastball pitch.
Take a camera and one lens with you and by ready…
Author
That’s it. Bat for average, ala Ichiro, then swing for the fence.
Can you please stop distracting me with your colourful holiday videos and X100V! 🙂
Quick question: So how would you have approached this scene if you “only” had a Leica and a roll of T-Max 3200?
Author
Pretty much the same. I think shooting is shooting when you break it down into light, timing and composition.
Interesting take on the meaning of life.
Subjectively, and from the perspective of 86 years of said condition, life, I have come to several conclusions regarding its “calvario” aspects. The first station in an abbreviated series would take up the first sixteen years, where I was but a passenger on the parental bus.
The second stage would be when I met the love of my life, left school and had to find an occupation that would keep me our of the military, and close to her. That meant engineering, for which I cared not a jot. (There was, to me, no known path into professional photography, and had there been, it wouldn’t have served to keep me out of uniform. Photographers don’t count.)
The third stage on that personal calvario journey took place when conscription ended, I was able to get a break into the photo-unit of the engineering company where I was an apprentice engineer, and get into where I should have already been four years earlier. I also got married.
Fourth stage was when I had learned all I felt I needed to learn from that unit, and took the decision to go solo.
There followed a lengthy fifth stage where I cut my teeth and climbed the ladder (the game with the ladders and snakes is based on the life of a photographer), and discovered that plan as you might, it ends up as a pre-destined toss of the dice.
Then came stage six on that journey to metaphorical crucifixion. On a regular calendar gig, one where, unfortunately, there was always a client presence, over dinner one night, in front of models etc. this mother asked me how old I was. I was forty-seven. I no longer know if I laughed and dodged the arrow, or whether I felt compelled to lie, which I seldom did or do, or simply supplied the requested information. Whatever, it was my last gig with them.
So, to drip the final drop from this calvario path, I can look back as I hang from those nails and see lots of things very clearly.
You can plan your life away, but if mine is anything to go by, what’s for you won’t pass you by, and what’s not for you you’ll never get. But you still always have to be out there, trying.
The best years of a life can be while still a kid with no responsibilities; they can come later if you find yourself having some success in a chosen career. They probably manifest themselves in recognisable ways during your sixties when you know who you are, how far you will ever get along your chosen trail. That brings with it some kind of peace of mind. There is little inclination towards regrets – you know by now that they are pointless – and if you have enough pennies saved to supplement the state pension, then you can, health and politicians permitting, enjoy whatever time your gods have given you. (I bring in politicians, because the British ones, through Brexit madness, have turned my Spanish residency advantages from European-wide ones, to one just valid in Spain, where I was living at the time of that crazy decision to pretend that being European isn’t as valuable as being an insular little Brit. Bigoted British bastards.)
But hey, you have your own crazies trying to run – ruin? – America with similar fantasies of some imaginary intrinsic superiority; you’ll understand my pain when these people get their blinkered way.
So, Dan, in your early fifties, you have everything to live for, so enjoy the golden, active years without knocking yourself out.
Author
I fear I’m destined to knock myself out. It’s a Milnor family tradition.
Dan, you are getting better at this film shenanigans. Keep it up, it’s fun 👍
Author
It’s more fun but I have a long, long way to go. But thank you.
Hi, love de video. Maybe some day you could talk about your shoes like you did about your backpacks. I don’t know why is so interesting that stuff.
Author
I love shoes and have a wide variety. Could be an entire channel.
I also take way too many pictures of clouds that I end up never using.
Fun video!
Author
It’s contagious.