One of the comments I hear most frequently is how much readers enjoy the photos accompanying my posts, most of which Linda or I shoot, with the remainder usually from the Unsplash photography site. But today’s post is an exception, as it was shot by a freelance photographer for USA Today named Erich Schlegel, who visited us during the holidays. He shot the above photo using a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and captured our home here from a unique angle.
I am sharing this with you because photography is becoming a bigger part of my creative repertoire and I plan to keep you all updated on my fun in the field. As much as I love to write, I also enjoy how photography allows me to capture a moment in time and thus help to preserve a memory for posterity. I guess you could describe me as a writer who creates word pictures and a photographer who makes memories with photos.
As renowned author and photographer Wright Morris wrote in Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory, “Through writing, through the effort to visualize, I became a photographer, and through my experience as a photographer, I became more of a writer…I glimpsed the connection between words, my own written words, and the photographs I was taking. Rather than ponder the photograph, then describe my impressions, I found in what I had written the verbal images that enhanced, and enlarged upon, the photograph.”
I wrote earlier about my purchase of a Canon A-1 film camera this summer and am happy to report I am using it to capture this winter’s beauty in black and white. And besides my iPhone SE, with which I shoot most of my photos, I have a Leica C-Lux 3 point-and-shoot, which takes awesome pictures also. The famous street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson shot exclusively with a Leica and I recently read the only book he ever wrote titled The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.
“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously…[And] it is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression,” writes Cartier-Bresson. “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
So, why am I sharing all of this with you? It is because our minimalist practice of paring possessions has enabled Linda and I to explore creative outlets that we were too busy to enjoy due to our suburban lifestyle spent maintaining other stuff that failed to fulfill us. And whatever your favorite pastime is, I encourage you to break out of your busyness long enough to make some memories of your own.