Man. These are the biggest files I've loaded to the blog. Click on em and see how big they get. And that's the output from an Olympus EP-2. Amazing to me. But that's not what this is all about.
These are images I took last April when I did a fun roadtrip to west Texas. These were done in Marathon at a funky, fun hotel in the middle of town in the middle of nowhere.
I didn't know what I expected to find but as usual I didn't find it I found something else. And that's fine. That's the experience of trying something new. You really don't know what you're going to end up finding. So a whole year has passed and it's time to go somewhere again.
When you are in a precarious job like photography there's always a temptation to make your vacation into something that can be monetized. I started thinking up workshops so I could make the big bucks like Joe and David, without having to go thru the process of selling anything tangible to the ad agencies or the companies I work for.
I thought about a week long workshop for 10 people in Marfa, Texas. We'd stay at the Paisano Hotel, have all kinds of desolate adventures and share war stories over great bottles of wine and rare steaks. But then I remembered that the two deficits Marfa seemed to have last time I was there were good wine and supermodels. And what's a workshop without good wine?
I've been doing a lot of video and I have something like twenty five years of experience doing TV commercials and stuff so I thought maybe I could throw together some sort of cool multi-media workshop teaching people how to make movies with their DSLR's. But God, that's so time consuming and I'd come back from vacation with no finished work for me.
Then I decided to bag all the monetizing possibilities and challenge myself to shoot fun stuff for a week and plaster it all over this blog. To do something for me. To shoot stuff I liked instead of stuff I thought someone else might like and it all made sense to me. I should just have fun.
Then I thought about all you guys out there and what I wanted to say to you. Well, here it is: "Life is short. If you love to do art then get out of the office and out of the house and do some damn art that you like. Don't follow a leader. Don't take a workshop. Fill the tank and ride. Find your muse and squeeze it for every last drop. Fall in love. Take a different road. Meet strangers and photograph them. Share secrets with someone. Sleep under the stars. Eat something you've grilled over a campfire. Stay one night in a five star hotel. Drag your camera everywhere. Write a poem. Write a love letter. Be silly. Dive into Balmorhea Springs. Listen to new music. Stay up all night. Kiss someone with passion. Eat great food. See the ocean. But do something fun and new for Spring Break. Life is random. Take the prize while you are still alive."
And those are my thoughts about a good Spring Break vacation. Do I have a metric to measure the success for any of this? You gotta be kidding.
