Had an interesting evening a couple of nights ago.  We had a couple of very windy days here in Western Colorado.  Windy enough to uproot 3 trees at the campsite.  They missed my ‘home’ by about 18″.  I was out and about at the time, so when I got back to view the recently altered landscape I was quite relieved that (1), nothing was damaged, and (2), I wasn’t around and in the middle of it!  Spent about an hour chopping logs and cleaning up.  Yes, chopping logs.  An axe.  Old school.

As I sit and think about business that needs to be done, from a tent in the hills, I find it a very interesting and challenging affair.  I can make phone calls and text, I can plan and make lists, but have no internet…no email, no social media, no blog posting.  Makes me thankful that I’m old enough and experienced enough with the old technology of pen and paper.

Old technology is good to revisit, especially for the creative and in particular, for the photographer.

Technology has obviously changed how we do what we do.  The digital age of photography has made it easy to preview work and has opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities with the tools available to us for processing images.  And without the limitations of film, whether a single sheet or a roll of 12 or 36 exposures, we can go crazy and shoot vast numbers of images without a second thought.

And therein lies the problem……

“New” photographers that have only known photography in the digital world don’t know, and old seasoned vets sometimes forget, but there was a great advantage to the limits afforded us by film.  Chiefly, we had to slow down.

We had to think about every shot, about every frame.  It was film: no instant preview to check focus, background and stray hair.  No Photoshop to fix contrast, exposure and stray hair later .  (I hate stray hair).

I still try to shoot that way, one frame at a time, getting everything “in the camera,” but sometimes the tech gets in the way.  It becomes too easy to just pound out the shots without a critical view of the image in the viewfinder.

Writing this blog, and all of the blogs focused on this journey, with a pen in a journal on paper forces me to slow down, to think a little, (or a lot), before the ink paints the letters.

There is a lot of advise that I could give to a new photographer.  After all, I’m old and full of advise.  But I think the most sage advise I could give to anyone in any craft is to back away from the technology once in a while.  SLOW DOWN.  Give your mind and heart a chance to build the image.  Or in this case, a chance to think before spilling thoughts onto  the page.

Technology is a wonderful thing and can lead to truly amazing and incredibly creative work.  But we need to slow down and take a vacation from the tech from time to time.

Except spellcheck.  Never take a vacation from spellcheck.