The Written Picture

They came with the frame

I love the movie The 'burbs with Tom Hanks. It was made in 1989 and didn't do too well at the box office, but still it's one of my favorites. There's a part where all the neighbors finally decide to go over and meet the Klopeks, a very odd family that's just moved in.

Rumsfield (Bruce Dern) picks up a frame and looks at the picture:

Mark Rumsfield: Oh, pretty girl! Friend of yours? 
Hans Klopek: [in an accent] No, it came with the frame.
Mark Rumsfield: [mocking] It came wit da frame? 

I love that because I've always wondered whose family is in those picture frames that stare out at you from the shelves of Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Are they real? Did someone sell their family photo or was this a photo shoot set up just to sell the frame? Who could possibly look like that?

Well I found the family.

Picture it. It's a warm summer night. You live in a loft apartment over the city. Your kids are back together for one night only. You walk to dinner, you laugh, you catch up. And you decide that you want pictures of your kids (and a few of the rest of the family). Only they're not so sure they want to be photographed. I don't know why when they look like this:

I kept thinking, Are these people real?? They were all so pretty. They look like the families in those picture frames you buy.

By the time I met them, the sun was low and golden. It was the first full day of summer. Everything seemed perfect.

But getting your picture taken is nerve wracking no matter who you are, no matter what you look like. I lifted my camera, and Vanessa, the daughter, said nervously, "I wish somehow we could take pictures of people's insides instead."  I froze for a moment. The comment was so sudden, so honest and raw. Her brother (a surgeon) said, "Um, we can..." We laughed, but I knew what she meant. If only you could capture a person's essence instead of all the outward things we're self-conscious about. I thought about it the rest of the night as I snapped their pictures.

I don't want all of your photos to be perfectly posed shots. I want to find out who you are and photograph that. I can't have it all figured out beforehand; I have to be in the moment. I have to take what comes. And that leaves me feeling very vulnerable, too. And sometimes, I'm just as afraid of taking your picture as you are of getting your picture taken. Experience matters not at all. Sometimes I even think it gets worse the longer I do this.

But in a funny sort of way, I'm glad about getting nervous. I think it's nothing short of a miracle that you can hold a person's face in your hands forever... even long after they've gone. And that's what I think about when I take your picture - that someone else would crumble and fall without your sweet face here. I don't take that lightly, and I don't ever want to.

I'd like to think that somehow, I did capture their insides on that beautiful summer evening. I loved the secrets, the giggles, the private conversations. I loved how silly they were and how much fun they had together. You can't pose that. I don't think you can look like this without revealing who you truly are underneath. And they let me see that.

What a beautiful family this was. They could have come with the frame you buy in a store. But these pictures only scratch the surface... there's more beauty underneath what you see here. So much more.

Taking the Scenic Route

I walked 4 miles yesterday. I didn't mean to.

In less than 8 weeks, I'll be hiking in the mountains, and I'm trying hard to get in shape. It was just me and my iPod and the road. I came to the point where I normally turn right, but up ahead was a gravel road lined with a row of telephone poles. It made my heart ache. I couldn't resist.

I ended up walking 4 miles over pavement and gravel roads without my camera. This was about getting in shape, not about getting pictures. And so what happened? Every single thing I saw was a beautiful picture.

• The clouds looked like white cotton spread apart.
• Cloud shadow swept across open fields
• Day lillies sprouted by the road
• An old creek looked shadowy and creepy
• Puddles in the ditches reflected the cloud-spotted sky
• Wildflowers sang in the sun

And I didn't capture a single image. At least not a single image that any of you can see. I've written before about how I don't always take my camera with me. And here's why:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

    -William Wordsworth

You see, I take pictures all the time, they're just not always with my camera.

Hello Summer

52 in 52 - halfway done

Remember how I made a goal to read 52 books in 52 weeks? Well thanks to this series of books, I'm not only halfway done, I'm also halfway done AHEAD of SCHEDULE.

That series is crazy addictive and not done yet. The 9th and final book comes out next month. So I imagine that'll be another quick book I can add to the list. Until then, I'm feeling like reading something like Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days or maybe finally the last book in The Forest of Hands and Teeth series. Nothing like a little zombie apocolypse in the summertime. Though my girl's trying to get me to read Lauren Oliver's Delirium. I loved her book Before I Fall so maybe I'll dive into that.

Have you noticed I read a lot Young Adult literature? It seems like I'm always trying to get back to that time when I had long summer days stretched out before me and a book cracked open on my lap.

Summers were made for reading. And that's how I'm spending mine.

Long Rainy Afternoons

How Shakespeare Taught Me to Take Better Pictures

One of my professors in college said that Romeo & Juliet would have been just another cheesy teenage love story, except that it happened in such a short time and was surrounded by darkness. "It's like a lightning strike in the night," he said.

Their story was brighter because it was wrapped up in night. The darkness that surrounded the bright light was where the poetry was. Shakespeare wove images of day and night, light and dark, all through-out the play:

And not impute this yielding to light love, Which the dark night hath so discovered.

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon...

Come night, Come Romeo, Come thou day in night.

Light and dark. I loved that idea. And I filed it away.

Four years ago I walked to the end of our block. A storm was moving in, bringing a cloud that looked like a dark ocean wave. Our little campus is at the end of that block. I didn't care much for the buildings in the picture. I wanted to photograph the clouds. But later, as I looked at what I'd taken, the buildings seemed to glow. They were the most interesting part of the photo. I didn't care that it wasn't what I'd wanted to capture. I was in love with the way they were lit up against the blackest clouds. Like day in night. It wasn't the best picture I'd ever taken, but it taught me so much.

We see things filtered through emotion. In nostalgia. In what has sweetly wounded us with longing or homesickness. We see the world through what makes our hearts ache. A child who's tiny only for a second, a sunset that means another day is done. We snap pictures trying to pin down what is slipping away so quickly. And often those pictures mean nothing to anyone but the one who took them. There is no story in the picture. There is no poetry. "It looked so much better in real life!" we cry. Isn't that always true with photographs? "You should have seen it," we tell our friends. "You should have been there."

But that photo is how it looked. The camera didn't lie. It captured what we saw. It just couldn't capture what we felt. It couldn't capture the poetry.

Cameras see in light and dark. They capture how much or how little light touches the sensor (or negative). We see a beautiful mountain, and we want to capture how it makes our hearts swell. The camera merely takes in how much light, how much dark. And we lose something.

After I saw that storm, I watched for moments where light touched dark. I started trying to capture that.

Sometimes I don't care what I'm photographing, I just want to capture the play of light and shadow.

The place where light and dark touch is usually the most dynamic part of the picture. The same thing exists in novels and movies. A man gets the promotion he's always wanted only to find out the woman he loves has left him. Light and dark. When opposing forces meet, there is a story.

Sometimes it's hard to notice, but learning to notice is how you learn to see. 

It makes an otherwise dull picture more interesting. But it does something else, too.

This is how you show that a child is growing up. This is how you show that another day is done. This is how you show that it is all fleeting.

This is the best way I know to show what sweetly wounds us.

Sometimes you snap a picture just for fun or to prove that you were there or to remember something that happened. But sometime, try to find where light and shadow, day and night, meet. That's where the poetry lies. Shakespeare knew it. Now you do, too.

I love:

I'm excited to announce:

of my online shop!

I'm selling prints of some of my favoritest pictures (unframed).  

Here's the fine print (no pun intended):

• Prints are 5x7 or 8x10-ish (unless they're square - hence the -ish) and ready for framing.
• All images are professionally printed which means they will look just as good in real life as they do on your computer screen. Unless you have a crappy screen, then they will look better. Or maybe you already have a good screen and you think they look bad. In which case, they will look just as bad in real life.
• I'm offering a Create-your-own-print-package Package in case you want to order 3 or more prints. Find out more here.
• If you've seen something by me that you have to have but it isn't listed, send me an email. I'd be happy to put any of my prints into your hands. Unless it's of one of my kids. Then I won't because that's just creepy.
• Because there are baby birds in a nest in the backyard, and the pool is open, and we have a dog that insists upon being walked, and I have a boy that likes to ride his bike a lot, and because I have recently discovered this series of books, please allow up to a week for your prints to ship. Unless you know me in real life. Then you know it will really be much longer. Kidding. 

Anyway, you can visit my shop here.

While there, you might see a link to this website: 

That's right. I'm bona fide.

I have been a busy little bee. And now, I really must get back to my reading.

I love paper

For the longest time, I've told my clients, "I don't deal in prints." But that's about to change. I've been testing out some different pro labs in the last couple of weeks, and I can't tell you what it does to me to see a stack of pictures.

It just comes down to this. I love paper in any shape or form, be it spiral-notebook paper or photographic prints. And I love the stories that are on them, whether they are in words or in pictures.

I don't eat fruit & I kill plants

It's not intentional. I don't mean to not eat fruit. It's certainly nothing personal against anyone in the fruit family. I just don't think about fruit. I'd rather eat broccoli.

But for some reason, I'm taking pictures of flowers and fruit. I don't know why. It's a mystery and I'm going with it. But If you've stumbled across this blog and don't know me in real life (or even if you do but don't know this little fact about me), you'd think I was obsessed with flowers. OK. I am sort of obsessed with flowers. The problem is, I kill them.

So I think this whole picture taking thing might be somewhat related to wanting what you can't have. OK. I can have fruit whenever I want, I just rarely want it. But I want to be the kind of person that wants to eat fruit. And I want to be the kind of person who doesn't kill plants. Until that happens, I guess I'll just photograph them.