Tree of Life, Norfolk, 2010
I don’t care whether you paint, take photographs or write music and lyrics. Whatever the medium, it’s fun when you find a stash of old work that you didn’t think you had anymore.
Okay, so maybe it isn’t always so great, maybe even a little scary. You find stuff that shows how little you knew way back when. You see technical flaws and compositional flaws. If there’s any reassurance in seeing it, it’s in hopefully being able to see how far you’ve come.
There was a period of years when my eyes didn’t “see” pictures. Where they’d once naturally composed scenes without even thinking about it, now they didn’t. My first explanation would probably be that I was distracted by other things in life. The real reason, though, was that while I was paying more attention to other things I was letting my eyes get lazy. It was only years later when I had a little more time on my hands and made a more deliberate return to photography that my “eye” improved.
The flip side of this condition is that when you get back into the regular habit of taking pictures, it’s easy to end up with lots of folders of pictures you’ve forgotten. You do your initial cull, pull out the ones you like and never go back to clean up or clean out the rest.
The other day I came across a group of photographs I’d taken almost exactly a year ago during a morning walk in downtown Norfolk. It’s not like they were hidden. I just hadn’t looked at them in a while. And it turns out some of them weren’t so bad.
Skewed View, Norfolk, 2010
Peek-a-Boo, Norfolk, 2010
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No, not bad at all! Quite good, I'd say. These are great! True--when I feel embarrassed about things I do with w/c's these days, I look back on others and think--man, they're even worse! Haaaa.
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