As a former English teacher, now photographer, I'm very conscious about the grammar, the content, and the images that I post in both the website and the blog. Not just "your" and "you're" or "its" and "it's," but the meat and potatoes of what it is that makes reading about and looking at these images rewarding. They are a synopsis of what I've done with a camera over the past forty-seven years. Virtually none of these images were work-related, meaning that I took them because "I like to take pictures." I feel naked without a camera.
Last year I took a class called "A Year to Live." One of our assignments was to write our own eulogy. In mine I quoted a document I wrote nearly forty years ago (when I was an English teacher) that I posted on a sticker that I placed on the back of every photograph I wanted to sell. Here it is:
"Henry Thoreau recognized that life was filled with brief moments wherein things reveal themselves for what they really are, moments he called “fabulous realities.”
It is in search of these, the elusive expression, or the instant when the sun and sky and water come together that I take my camera.
I have spent the last five years in Sonoma County, California, watching and photographing the autumn grape harvest, the waves crashing the rugged California coastline, and the sun struggling to touch the majestic redwoods, in the damp secluded forests along the Russian River.
In quieter moments I search the leaf-lined creek beds for the subtle earth colors of seasons changing and seasons past, or the faces of my children for the wonder of childhood with its joys and disappointments. Perhaps that is why many of my close-up photographs mean so much to me, that in the smaller corners of our lives there live—to paraphrase William Blake—the grain of sand that possesses infinity,
and the hour that speaks for all eternity.
I seek those things in our lives which may last only for a moment, or are so small as to be almost invisible, but which nevertheless remind us of
the eternities and infinities that lie both within and without us."
Thirty some-odd years later I was asked to submit a current bio. Here it is:
"I like to take pictures."
That's it. If someone enjoys them, I'm pleased. Mostly, I've taken them for myself, though, to please me. That's why at age 70 I'm actually creating my first web site. It's a way for me to put together what I've been doing since 1969 when I bought my first camera. I like to take pictures.
And that's what I'll be doing today...