One Year Later
It’s been one year since I was named one of Olympus’s Break Free Program Participants. This was the snowball that started the slide toward professional photography that I still hope will one day turn into an avalanche of art sales and commissioned work. My confidence in my art has progressed. Let’s be honest; I think my art has progressed. I still have days when I doubt myself. I have days when I come back with nothing I can use. I have days where I fall completely in love with a photograph I’ve taken, and post it… and hear crickets. Sometimes art is that way, I think. An image has to speak; not just to you as the artist, but to the audience. I’m learning not just the craft of taking a good photograph, but also of telling a good story. It doesn’t have to be a story with words. The best photos draw the viewer in to a captured moment. I think the remarkable thing about photography is how I can capture a fleeting moment of a fraction of a second, and make it last interminably. The magic of photography is the magic of time.
I love photography, and I love to write. In the busyness of a full time nursing job and a full time interest in photography, I haven’t spent as much time as I’d like honing my writing skills. I want to present some of my favorite photographs in a longer format than social media allows. I hope you, faithful reader, enjoy the stories behind some of these favorite moments.
Two women walk together on a foggy beach. Maybe they’ve walked this way a hundred times. Maybe they will walk again this way another hundred. But it will never be exactly this way again. Their friendship will change. The beach will be different. The sun will shine or the rain will fall. But this moment is now visually stored forever, not just on my hard drive, but in my heart.
My favorite images evoke that sense of a story. You can see it in any way you’d like. I see a lifetime a friendship, the melancholy weight of history between two close friends, and a hopefulness for the future of many more walks together.
A timeless waterfall endlessly flowing, permanence and ephemera.
Someone braved the glacial cold to build a cairn here. I don’t know why. But I think, as I look at it, that it mirrors the waterfall. Rocks exude permanence. But built into a delicate tower, the next flood will carry them away. Like the waterfall that seems endless but also ever-changing.
The lighthouse keeper’s house at Heceta Head in Oregon, rest serenely on a bluff over the Pacific. Fog weaves its way through the pines.
My heart feels at home in the mountains. But I could get behind a cliffside view like this one. Hot, sunny beaches don’t hold much interest for me, but I’ll take a chilly lonely beach with some mysterious fog thrown in for ambience.
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