I’m home sick for the second day (cold? flu? Who the heck can tell any of these cruds apart?), but Monday, my husband Peter and I reconnected with an old friend, Paul Hawkwood, who is taking the same online photography class I am (with Laura Valenti: “Candela: Finding Inspiration Through Photography”) class, and took a photo walk together up on the Pleasant Hill side of Eugene’s Mt. Pisgah.
Since I am sitting around the house with nothing better to do, I made a little slide show video of our walk using the Replay video editing app.
https://vimeo.com/117416973
The photo below of the tree being isolated by a muted shaft of light from the thicket behind it was probably my favorite of the day because of the texture and detail of the chaotic branches–a study in object/field/ground. But more than that, it does what I say I want to do in my photography. In my artist’s statement, I say:
In my photography, I attempt to make things look as if they were imbued with a dramatic underlying force. I photograph to discover traces of the luminous fingerprints of the divine.
Photography takes me out of my head and into the world of light and shadow, form and composition.
I seek source imagery–those images that for me are emerging from some fresh spring of the world right now.There is a relationship with memory, dream, and reflection to be explored, photographed, suggested, and known.
What I enjoyed was that the three of us moved at the same easy pace, talking but not over talking, taking photographs, being fully present in the morning and the rare opportunity it gave us to reconnect around a mutual love of photography.
As a hard working college teacher fully wired into the digital age, like the Old Woman who lived in a shoe, who had so many students, she didn’t know what to do, I intensely value time alone with my camera, and perhaps like-minded others, unplugged for an hour or a day, and I gratefully receive all encouragement to keep on doing what I often have to fight to get free enough to do.
