retrofocus ramblings.

An important video reposted from John Harrington’s excellent photo business ‘blog.

Speaking from experience…..

[youtube]mj5IV23g-fE&eurl[/youtube]

So she said and I heard her well enough with the second utterance. Given why I was there and what I was doing it was as good a way as any to get my attention. Still, for some reason I wanted to tell her my name. I resisted and took a snapshot of her and her classmates from a bygone decade in a fun embrace.

It’s their reunion. 30 years by my count.

So it goes.

(For the most part this ‘blog of mine has been a testing ground for a number of things. I like the fact that I can push snapshots from my iPhone to Flickr and then push them directly here. That’s pretty cool. There are many ways to do this and if good old Twitter can stay up for more than a couple of hours I have a mind to play with a couple of Twitter-centric solutions to this. I’ve barely started to ‘blog and now I’m drifting towards micro-blogging. I guess it’s all a big experiment)

Today – it’s a bit of reflective writing.

If you didn’t know my name you would naturally see me as a photographer Saturday afternoon. Draped in a pair of Nikon D200 SLRs with impressive glass attached to each, I certainly cut the cloth of a photographer and that would be the case. I realized for the umpteenth time that what I do often is seen by the rest of the planet as who I am and some days it is the same thing. This weekend it also dawned on me that it was the first time in about 14 years that I was not running around as a community news photographer documenting the right of passage that is high school graduations. I actually enjoyed many of those graduations. I did. It is the pace of the modern newspapers deadlines and staffing foibles that changed the equation for me. For decades the community news photographer was asked to be in multiple places at once. Part of the game. In the last few years the equation became even more unbalanced. I truly no longer miss it.

I have much to write about my musings in the area of “the photographer” and life as it goes. More to the point it is something I think about and have thought about for many years. Some of it has to do with the act of being there and being a witness to something no matter how large or trivial but not really taking part in it. While books have been written about the role of the observer in any given situation and how that changes the very situation itself, but I’ve never come across much from the position of the observer.

The feeling of being on the other side of life’s glass partition. Separated by the lens, yes, by your actions as a photographer, yes, from the rest of life’s tribe. I’m not sure I’ve quite figured out how to describe it. It may be a particular case of my own making. A distance I have honed to allow myself to be there without the mental entanglements. Not quite sure exactly.

Somethings more to ‘blog about.

Happy Monday!