Friday, April 24, 2009

Why?


Every once in a while one of my photographer friends will ask me -- fairly pointedly, I might add: “Why do you do that blog-thing?” I guess my friends think the doing of this must be time-consuming (it’s not, I tell them,) and my friends also hint that there’s something a little weird about putting oneself and one’s personal (non-professional) work out there, in public, on the freaking worldwide Web, fer god’s sake.

My friends are correct on that second point: Going public like this is weird, and I’ve given a fair amount of thought to the question: “Why Do I Do This?”

I have two answers:

--As a photographer, I began these posts over two years ago thinking it would be a worthy thing to do a blog that talked about the creative process, rather than cameras and lenses.
--As a human being who lives in a rural area but understands that most folks now live in cities, I thought I could sometimes share pictures and thoughts about farm animals and gardens and other earth-based stuff I see outside my front door.

This week I seem to be seeing, uh, eyes:
-- There’s a white horse who’s been brought to pasture just down the lane from our house, and he’s got the most amazing eyes. I’m told they’re called ghost-eyes.
--As always, our cat, Basil, invariably winds up in some of my home diary pictures.

Of course I didn’t intentionally seek-out these two, circularly similar pictures; it was absolute coincidence that they presented themselves in the same week. Then again, I suppose it’s possible that the mice spinning the wheels inside this photographer’s brain decided “This week, let’s do CIRCLES!”

Maybe my photographer friends and I should get together and discuss MICE!