How do you know if you are having fun? How do you know you are still engaged with something you felt passionate about? I had a phone conversation with a VSL regular yesterday. He made the observation that I'm always shooting and always posting. The distillation of that comment, in my mind, is...."you must love what you do because you don't have to do it but you seem to love the act of making photographs." And that's about the long and short of it. If you don't feel compelled to go out and do the thing you profess to love you might have fallen out of love. I don't know what the remedy is for that.
Today I went to early swim practice. It was crowded and competitive. Early practice is, on holidays, from 8-9 a.m. I had so much fun and felt so good I stayed around for another hour and did the second practice as well. I'm not training for anything in particular but the vibe in the pool and the attitude of the swimmers was so full of energy that I just didn't want the fun to stop. And I feel exactly the same way about photography. There's so much left to do and so little time ---- relatively speaking.
I'm power washing mold and fungus from the rock walls around the property as well as the pave stone walkways and the other side walks. I'll rush to get through that chore. Why? So I can grab that Lumix S5 and the 28mm f2.8 Zeiss Biogon ZM and go out and make some photographs of another glowering and heat intensive afternoon around town. Who knows what I'll find? Who knows what kinds of photographs I'll bring back. But we'll never know unless I go out and take them.
It might just be the walking that I enjoy. Maybe having a camera is like carrying around a security blanket that lets me pretend to be productive when really I'm just out sampling life. But, if that's the case then I guess I can refer to the resulting photos as collateral happy accidents.
This is the last tranche of Iceland images I'll put up for a while. I think I like looking at them and remembering that it was cold enough on all those days to make me happy I had gloves. Happy I had on boots. Happy to feel the chilly wind on my face. The images remind me that at some point in the future it may again cool down in Austin.
Iceland is on my bucket list for a revisit. But not until the high season of tourism passes and the locals have time to relax and refresh. Late October seems about right...
Saw a bumper sticker last week: "Remember what you wanted to be." It's a wry reminder that we spend a lot of time in life getting sidetracked and locked into situations we never really wanted to be in. If we can remember what we wanted in our youth we can at least keep aiming in that direction.
Another quote that struck me this week: "You don't get old until you start thinking you are old."
Suck it up. Get out there. Systematically erase regret. And...maybe go to Iceland for a while.
