For awhile now whenever I went out photographing I wasn’t really focussed on people.  Shooting candidly in the street with a 35mm camera just wasn’t where my head was photographically.  Sure, I’d make a frame here or there but that was more incidental than intentional.

But all along I’d still been looking at lots of street photography. I suppose I was trying to figure what type of work appealed to me most.

Then I reviewed a few photographs from the year that I thought worked. From those, I kind of figured out what I wanted to do.  Shoot a wider scene.  No decisive moment necessarily. Just some sort of harmony.  I don’t really believe in a hierarchy of moments on the street. Any moment can be made into a photograph.  What’s the significance some might say?  There might not be any, other than some sort of harmonious visual representation of reality.  That sounds like bullshit, I know, but sometimes when you try to verbalize visual ideas they don’t come out that well.

This week I went out a few times and my only objective was to photograph people. I needed to boost my confidence and get back into some sort of rhythm.  That’s really thing with street photography.  The engine takes awhile to warm up, but once you get going you start to move and react quickly.

Another decision I made was to not be so picky about composing.  See the scene, find edges, photograph.  It’s been fun and interesting.  I don’t plan on necessarily using all of these, or maybe not any of them in the projects. But I’m ok with that. It’s nice to out shooting with no project or real purpose in mind.  Just me, people and photographs.

I have always been a procrastinator.  In college, I always crammed for test the night before and would usually pull all nighters to finish papers. Anytime I’m given a deadline, I put it off it off until the last possible moment.  I’m just wired that way.

I’m still not sure how it happened exactly, but I was invited to give a presentation of my work and talk about social media at the B&H Event Space on August 12th.  It’s very humbling especially given that any sort of recognition I’ve received from photography has been purely through the internet.

I knew immediately how I wanted to do the presentation.  I’ve documented my journey to photography thoroughly, and perhaps because it happened later in life, I know exactly why I picked up a camera, and how I became actively involved in the photography community on the web.  The angle or arch is about my transformation from wannabe writer to photographer/blogger.

Writing for me has always been an isolating endeavor.  I didn’t really blog, or share much of my work back then. I was writing screenplays mostly, in addition to a stream of consciousness journal, which aren’t exactly the type of material you share with too many people.  But once I picked up photography, I realized it was a very social endeavor.  I was sharing photographs with my friends almost immediately.  It felt natural.

Even today, I’m much more apprehensive about sharing something I write than my photographic output, which I’ll be honest, at times is extremely mediocre. But it doesn’t seem to matter because it takes a split second to look at a photograph. A piece of writing requires an extended period of attention.

The anxiety I have over writing, and have had for a long time, is that I’m always concerned that I end up writing too much about myself.  Writing the LPV OpEd pieces has been a great release for me because they tend to be about ideas, and not about my life.

So my challenge with this presentation is to merge the personal narrative with the ideas.  Do they go well together?  In my head, I can see how it all works together, but as I’ve learned, executing is always challenging.

I have two weeks to put the presentation together. I have a good start. Putting the photographs together will be a piece of cake.  I feel confident, and very thankful I took a few years of improv. After trying to be spontaneously funny in front of hardcore comedy fans, talking about photography to photography nerds will be a breeze.  I’m looking forward to it.