After a year of daily thanks in my own way, I wanted an outlet. At a writers conference years ago, I heard Annie Dillard sat that writers could never write too much. I can't begin to remember the quote exactly, but what I remember her saying is that we have inexhaustible material: there's no end to the imagination. For that reason, she said--or something to this effect--we should write and write and write and write.
I don't remember her talking about how much should be published, but that bit of advice stuck, not because I thought it a strategy as much as, again, a kind of discipline. I was, at that time, going back to being a full-time classroom teacher, not three-quarters as I'd been for a few years, which meant, for me, less time to write. I've known since I was a first-year high school teacher that squeezing out time to write was tough when you're employed full-time in a classroom. I'd done it for decades, but it was tough. Once again going into the classroom full time meant I was scared of doing nothing creative, which would be hard.
When blogging started as a "thing," I don't know, but in 2007, one year of gratitude journaling under my belt, I decided that if I'd stay at it, at writing, blogging might be the thing, whatever blogging was or is. The thanksgiving diary forced me to look around every day, to let my mind wander as I sat in the chair in front of the computer screen at whatever, at "stuff in the basement" where I was sitting. Fine. Whatever. Give it a title "Stuff in the Basement."
I've never really felt as if I was going off anybody's deep end, but I'd just invested in my first good digital camera at the time, and I've always loved photography--I don't know why, just have. When I was in high school my dad pooh-poohed a career with a camera--"that's not a real calling, is it?" he said or something to that effect. He was still holding out for his son to become the preacher his own father had been. Or a teacher. Which would be fine too.
I had no idea how photographers made a living, if they did at all, so I listened to my dad and went to school to be a teacher, a real "calling." I have no regrets about that, but what's also true is that I never lost my love for the camera. In 1976, when the Arizona Schaap family (dad, mom, daughter) moved to Iowa, I bought a camera, an expensive Vivitar SLR.
But, years later, digital photography changed everything, making razor-sharp photographs a snap. Digital cameras got cheap fast, long before your smart phone included a heady camera and onesies became all the rage.
I'd grown up in Wisconsin, then moved to Iowa for college, northwest Iowa, an almost treeless universe, save for swarms that had grown up around a thousand homesteads. What I knew about what had become my own neighborhoood is that it was not a photographer's paradise. Taking beautiful pictures of the Grand Canyon requires nothing more than pulling a trigger. Taking beautiful pictures of Siouxland was a challenge I told myself I'd have to learn to do.
So I started practicing, going out on Saturday mornings, when the family was still asleep, just to look for beauty. Besides, going out was its own kind of pilgrimage, good for my mental health, another discipline really, good for the soul. Once a month maybe, I tried to take beautiful pictures of what it didn't take long to identify as gorgeous moments. I did a ton of wandering close by home, because I'd try to be back in the house by the time the family got out of bed.
These new digital pictures transferred to the screen in radiant beauty, and I learned quickly that a blog was a good place for a show. So started a practice that continued for years--"Saturday Morning Catch" was the title for hundreds of pics I posted on Sunday, often combining them as software programs used to deliver. I'd put up the best shots. Soon I got the sense that people enjoyed them.
Throughout any given years--2008 to the present--I'd put up pictures from a shoot, thinking of the exercise as if I were fishing. Sometimes the stringer got full; sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes the best one looked something like this--kind of cool and campy, but highly tampered with ("filtered").
But losing only ginned up my desire to win. Soon enough, I learned to read the dawn before it arrived. On clear morning, the sun would burn everything up and getting any contrast in a shot wasn't easy for an amateur. Some cloud cover was a blessing because clouds were the sun's canvas.
So, on good mornings, I knew opportunities were rich. What I needed was foreground. Shooting pictures became something akin to hunting. I'd fly up and down gravel roads looking for abandoned barns like that one or lonely prairie trees--there are hundreds. I started coming home with shots I started to think weren't bad. They never matched the heavenly glory I'd experienced, but part of the whole was there.
Same area, mid-winter 2010, no sun, winter. I'd begun to see that the arrangement of elements on the shot could generate its own kind of awe. No color here to speak of, the trees on the acreage behind seemingly victimized by a fire. Yet, there's beauty here.
I was learning some things about composition.
And now, mid-year, 2020, I have thousands of pictures of the world as I see it in rural Siouxland, endless landscapes in a region not many photographers would say holds much promise for a camera. I like to think they're wrong. Combine composition with sunrise and something quite nice shows up on the screen. Always better there, but what the camera saw isn't half bad.
I have the Artist to thank.
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Tomorrow--All good things must end, even things not so darn good.
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