I definitely have a love/hate thing with winter. Even more so as a photographer. There’s a graphic quality to winter that I crave the rest of the year. Snow simplifies the landscape lending its polar opposite to the over abundance of textures that usually surround us. It’s the smooth to balance the textured, the highlights to balance the shadows, the soft to balance the hardness. Snow gives us a clean canvas to explore the curves and shadows and silhouettes of nature. In short, it’s easy to make a graphically grabbing image in the winter. All summer long, I drive around making note of things that I want to shoot come winter. A particular tree with a beautiful shape and a clean background, a small brook winding through a hilly pasture, a perfectly clean field with a clear horizon that begs for blue skies and perfect clouds. I can see how these places would look in winter reduced to their most simple forms and I get excited for winter.

Then we have the anti-winter.
No snow. Or worse, just enough to highlight the already harsh and contrasty light, but not enough to clean things up. It’s like having a 6 month long mud season. Completely un-inspiring. Couple that with life’s usual ups and downs, and it gets hard to see anything worth shooting. It gets hard to find the motivation to go out in the cold, and wind, and this year, the rain, just to find a hail-Mary shot in the bad, flat light. The last thing I shot before today was a grey squirrel caught in the act of thieving the suet from the feeder. Not art, not even really humor. Evidence. Nearly a month ago.

Today something clicked.
When I have something weighing heavy on my mind, I go for a drive. Along the way I let my mind wander from thought to thought, settling briefly on the thing I’m not ready to deal with yet, then moving on for a while before coming back to it. Eventually, I come to a place where I can explore the thoughts I’ve been avoiding a little bit at a time. Today I travelled with a heavy heart. I knew it would be a long drive.

What I came up with was this, it is what it is. I know, it’s old and over used. But that’s just it. Most of our unhappiness in life comes from un-met expectations. Expectations we place on ourselves, expectations others place on us, and most of all, expectations that we perceive others have of us. We all tend to pre-conceive things in the name of being prepared for something. It’s natural to try to imagine the way something will be, the way a conversation might go, or the way someone might react. We also preconceive the way things are supposed to be. There’s this idea of how marriage is supposed to be, how parenthood is supposed to be, what grieving is supposed to be. Supposed to’s cause all kinds of problems.

I realized a while ago that I think differently that most people I know. I’m not very good at following the rules. I feel differently, I interpret things differently, I grieve differently. I used to judge myself harshly for this and tried so hard to be like the people around me. It just doesn’t work though. It wasn’t until today that I accepted the last thing though. I do grieve differently. It doesn’t mean that I care less, and it might or it might not be somewhat selfish, but it is what it is. There’s no point in trying to conform. I do grieve. Very differently and very privately, but I work through it and feel whole in the end. It is what it is.

And as I drove along after coming to this realization, I found myself in front of my tree. As far as trees go, it’s about as perfect and majestic as they come. I’ve had my eye on this tree all summer thinking about how stunning it would be in the winter. It’s shape and detail neatly isolated against a clean deep snow and smooth winter sky. I had nearly wrote off shooting today. Lack heart, lack of interest, and lack of snow would be my undoing.

Until I realized… it is what it is. So this is the anti-winter. Quit trying to make it pretty. Show it for what it is. It’s not pretty. It sucks. It’s muddy and cluttered and bleak. I’m pretty good at always seeing the silver lining in almost everything. But screw it. The anti-winter sucks, death sucks, and sometimes the shot just sucks. It is what it is, let it be just that and work around it.

As I write this, I haven’t downloaded the images yet. I’m committed to posting them though, however they turn out. Take them at face value, this is what it’s like this year. Let’s get on with it.

I sat down with my notebook one night and started trying to plan out the new site by asking myself some really basic questions. The kind of questions that my web design teacher from so many years ago would ask. So, what is the purpose of me having a website anyway? Am I trying to sell prints? Am I trying to sell my services? Am I trying to get noticed by some art director in an office in NYC? Is it just a vanity site to show friends and family that I don’t completely suck at something? Time for some brutal honesty, here. I don’t know. Where do I hope it will lead? I don’t know. What do I want to be when I grow up? I don’t know. Ouch. Okay, so let’s start with an easier question. What am I trying to say with my photographs? Stunned silence. Crickets. Clears throat and stares at the ceiling. Alrighty then! Seems like I’ve got some much bigger issues than just a MIA website.

Perfectionism is my undoing. So many people thing it’s a beneficial trait. It’s not. Perfectionism causes me to think that I need all of the information available to make a decision. It means that I will research something to death then still not make a decision because I can’t find the perfect solution. In this case, it makes me think that I have to have a clearly defined goal in mind before I can start considering layouts. Because, of course, if I’m showing one image at a time (like a photoblog) I would need a very different layout than if I’m trying to display photo essays. So why not find a theme/template that allows for all kinds of layouts? Because I can’t find one that is perfect! So weeks go by while I try to figure out why I even have a website to begin with.

I decided that to actually write and tell a story about some of my images was important to me. So was to sometimes tell a story through a series of images. That’s when I realized what has been missing from my photography, they’re just pretty pictures. Some have stories behind them, but I’m the only one who knows those stories. So now I have a photographic goal for this year, to actually say something with my images. Of course, in my mind, I couldn’t put up images that don’t conform to my new standard. And I haven’t had time to shoot much lately… so the perfectionist in me decided that I need all new material for a site before I could begin. Weeks go by while I try to overcome my photographic version of “writer’s block”.

Meanwhile, in my other life… I’ve been living Life in Limbo for what seems like months now. I’m in the running for a new position at work and getting it would mean some big changes. It seems like every time I try to plan something, the first thought that comes to my head is “will I still be able to do that with the new job?”. So as I’m thinking about the purpose of my site, I’m also wondering if that particular direction will be compatible with the new job. IF I get it. Perfectionism sucks.

I don’t know what it was, or even exactly when or why. But one day recently I woke up and said “Fuggit. Make a decision. ANY decision. And DO something! Declare an Open Major and just build the damned thing!”.

So here goes. There isn’t a clearly defined purpose behind this site. I would like to sell some prints to support my habit and my desire to photograph things that are more than a day’s drive away. I would like to learn to tell stories about my images and with my images. I would like a space to occasionally say something that doesn’t have much to do with photography. At this very moment, I’m not really looking to sell my services. But that could change. The blog posts will sometimes be about a single image. There will be posts that are essentially photo essays with very little written. And there will be some posts about things that I’m working on on a personal level (with pretty pictures to accompany). Best of all… it’s not perfect! Seriously, somehow I’ve managed to let go of my design control freak nature and just let some things be. At least for now. I’ve had to make a lot of compromises in the name of keeping my sanity and getting it done. I’m pretty proud of myself for that. Seriously proud.

It seemed like a great idea — at the time. And to be fair, all’s well that ends well, right?

This trip to Acadia was a quest for the perfect image for my living room wall, and I was bent on it being a long exposure shot of the waves crashing over the rocks just after sunset. Things were looking up, the rain of the previous day had given over to a beautifully clear day and the wind was producing some fairly large waves. There was even a nearly full moon due to rise shortly after sunset as a bonus. The only disappointment was that it would be the bottom of low tide just after dark, so I wasn’t expecting the waves to be as spectacular as they had been during the day. Oh well, just have to go back again!

As the sun started to near the horizon, I stuffed all my gear in my pack, grabbed an extra layer, hat, gloves, and trusty little headlamp, and headed out. Parking at one of the lots just West of Sand Beach, I ventured out onto the rocks. Meh. Not quite what I had been looking for. So along the roadside path I went, a bit farther West, and try again. Meh. Almost, but still not quite right. And on I went. After a couple more attempts I found a spot that looked promising and picked my way down across the rocks and set up my tripod. After shooting a few frames, I tweaked my position a bit by navigating across the chasms to get still farther West/South. Yeah, you see where this is going, don’t you?

The sunset was a bit lack-luster but I was still pretty happy with the colors that the long exposures were able to coax out of it. I played with exposure length, focal length, and position until I finally found a spot that gave me some good options while I waited for the moon to rise. Alas, it was not to be. Overcast skies blew in and squashed my plans in minutes. Oh well, guess I’ll have to go back again! I was having fun anyway, though. I may have actually squealed in delight at the preview once or twice. What really made me happy was that although it was low-tide, the surf was actually coming up almost as high as it had during the noon high-tide.

So I’m in my happy place, I’m shooting away, tweaking exposure and position, listening to the sound of the surf wow! That was a BIG one!, feeling the cold wind on my face, thinking “I LOVE this! I want to do this every day!”. Cool—another big one! Then that little voice whispers “psssst. Remember Peggy’s Cove?”. Uh, yeah. Maybe it’s time to go. I had been guessing at the focus for the past half hour anyway. Queue spray from the next big set. Everything gets jammed back in the pack and the tripod collapsed and locked down in a big hurry. I turn around to head for higher ground. Wow. That’s a lot of dark. And rocks. Crap. I mean, it wasn’t exactly blind-man’s-bluff groping my way across the cliffs and crags, I could see just fine for about 20 feet in front of me. There was no danger of stepping out into the abyss. But looking back up the rocks towards the road I realized that I couldn’t really pick out a route. Couldn’t see the path in the break of the shear rock face between me and my car. Oops. Not good. It was just about that time that the thought crossed my mind “geez, wouldn’t it suck if the batteries died now?”. That put a spring in my step!

Needless to say, I did eventually find my way back to the break in the rock and up the goat-path through the trees and boulders, and the half mile back up the road to the car. Lessons? Pack at least two light sources and don’t put them in the same place. Pay attention to the big picture as well as your footing. And always pay attention to that little voice that says that it’s time to go!

Should be back up and running soon.