Exhale!

If you’re reading this, you made it to the end of 2020. The days already are growing longer. It’s time to drop tired habits and try on new resolutions for fitness, for relationships, for work habits and more. Most of these new efforts will fall away, but that’s fine. Most mutations die off for a reason. Positive change is usually incremental. Sure, black swans occasionally reorder our worldview, but they are rare, by definition.

I am closing out the year by stepping back and taking stock. I am getting surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. The recovery period is generally about five months. I plan to do better than that, but it won’t be quick. In the meantime, it will be impossible to very difficult to sling a camera. So I will do some reading and studying and solo dance practice to keep active. I’ve been through this before. (Jujutsu and Aikido can be hard on the joints, especially when you do things wrong.)

In the past few weeks, I have gone driving around looking for subjects to photograph. I have not found that many. It has mostly been overcast and a bit cold and I just wasn’t into it. I realized I just wanted to get back into the studio or out on locatoin working with a live model. Self-portraits and still life are good ways to practice lighting but they only go so far. I crave human interaction. Alas, the pandemic and pre-operation quarantine have rendered that impossible for now.

In the meantime, I have entered a couple of photography contests. I don’t put much stock in such things, but they provide a good opportunity to learn. My work using Capture One software to process a problematic portrait was a finalist. But more important, it forced me to learn a great deal about the tools in that software. This week, I entered a contest sponsored by Adorama, a New York City camera emporium, emphasizing bokeh. That’s the phoneticization of a Japanese term meaning “blur.” It often refers to the balls of out-of-focus light seen in holiday photos shot with a wide aperture. But it actually can refer to any blurring that takes place outside of the field-of-focus in a particular lens. Blur can be caused by other factors, including camera shake, missed focus, movement of the subject, and Gaussian blur. Bokeh (pronounced bo-kuh) is the inherent blur of a particular lens and how it is used. For a more in-depth explanation, check out this video by Matt Granger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rQs6o-iHH8

Because I can’t really do much new work, I decided to go back through old photographs to find five images illustrating bokeh for the contest. Some are a couple of years old, so I re-edited them using Capture One. I love the way this program works, and I believe it substantially enhanced the images. I narrowed it down to 10 images and my daughter helped me pick five. Since I submitted them, I have seen many other fine shots illustrating bokeh on Instagram and in various Facebook groups. There are so many good photographers; I have no expectation of winning anything. But that doesn’t matter. I feel like I already have won.

In the process of preparing for the contest I researched the meaning of bokeh and refined my understanding somewhat. I opened old photographs and breathed new life into them simply by reprocessing them with the benefit of a few years of experience. I saw particular qualities that characterize my work. And I saw things that need improvement. I hope to emerge from physical therapy and the pandemic a stronger photographer and a better human being. That’s my mission statement for 2021.

What will you do with the new year? I hope you will consider letting me photograph your journey once it’s safe to do so again.

Happy New Year!