The Love of Place

As the above photo suggests, Virginia utilizes the iconic “Love” sign to feature idyllic spots around the state and I captured this one the morning of the balloon festival here in Lexington the weekend of our anniversary. Not only was the sign in sync with our celebration of love for one another but it also served as a reminder to me of how much there is to love about my home state. So I want to share some thoughts about “the love of place” and how it has played such a huge part in our minimalist journey to date.

“Explorers and adventurers understand a great truth. In order to experience the fantastic, they have to first put themselves in fantastic places,” states author Allen Arnold. “It is the same for us. Conversely, if we rely solely on common sense, we experience a common life.” Now, I am all for using common sense but relying solely on it can shrink the scope of our adventures. For example, with only a couple of exceptions, Linda and I have never moved to any of the amazing places we’ve called home with jobs awaiting us.

“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later,” stresses consultant Randy Komisar. As we all hopefully realize by now, events such as the pandemic can interfere with even the best laid plans. And Linda and I are so happy we made the move to sell our dream house in order to follow the new dream of living and moving more freely and lightly.

And since I alluded to it a few posts ago, I thought I’d finally share with you an update about my photography practice. My new site has been live for a while now so I invite you all to visit it at www.portphoto.net. As I mention on the home page, it is a place where I post some of my favorite images as well as share my philosophy behind the lens to give you a view of my creative vision and to reveal insights into my photographic process so I hope you enjoy it!

One Thousand Words

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that is so then I’ve captured a library’s worth of images in the past several years, namely with one or the other of my iPhones, as that is the camera that I typically carry on my person. Regular readers may be interested to learn that I am in the process of selling the vintage Canon A-1 film camera that I used to take black and white photos, as I am concentrating on digital images. 

And this past summer I compiled a collection of several favorites into the book pictured above aptly titled Maine Coast. The photos were captured up and down the coast of Maine during the past half dozen years we’ve lived here. And it features a mixture of ships, lighthouses, and other nautical sites naturally associated with life here in coastal Maine. Living so close to the ocean has been creatively inspiring and one of the results is this book.

One of the byproducts of minimalist living is that it helps to prune away the detritus of life and thus frees one to pursue such creative passions. I for one have become known as the family archivist over the years due to my practice of photographing and/or videoing various family functions. And while folks are not always enthused when asked to pose for a photo, I am naturally the one turned to at weddings, funerals, and other events. 

I am in the process of putting the finishing touches on my new photography website so stay tuned for more about that. And I will be sharing more soon about our upcoming move from the keeper’s cottage here at the Marshall Point lighthouse. It is said that all good things must come to an end and with a proposed rate hike of about fifty percent at the upcoming expiration of our three year lease Linda and I are moving onto the next spot on our journey. 

The Analog Life

Regular readers may recall that I bought a classic film camera a couple years ago and I am happy to report that I finally got my first roll of black and white film developed, with which I am quite pleased, and a sample print is pictured above. As you may realize, it is of our very own Marshall Point lighthouse here in Port Clyde, Maine. The entire roll was shot mostly last year and much of it in the winter to capitalize on the contrasts of the season. 

I was able to locate here in New England one of the few labs still processing black and white film and along with my prints they enclosed a bookmark thanking me for my business and suggesting: “Take a picture; read a book; hug someone,” all references to what I’d call the analog life. Though the first two can be done digitally, that was not the intent of the note, and their specialty is film photography.

As much as I value the digital revolution there is a special quality to tangible photographs, especially black and white prints. As photographer Bill Smith suggests, “The craft of photography is represented by, and visualized in, the beauty of a good black-and-white print, a translation of the world around us into shades of gray.” And life here on the coast of Maine lends itself very much to the monochromatic landscape photography that I love sharing with others. 

I still have three more rolls of 36-exposure black and white film to shoot so I am planning to use it and hopefully it will not take me another couple years per roll to finish them. And in the meantime, I may even get some of the first prints enlarged and framed for the total analog experience, so I will keep you posted. For more thoughts about analog stuff read my earlier post about The Revenge of Analog. 

Making Memories

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. 

Of Time and Treasures

As we transition from one season to the next I am reflecting upon one of the highlights of the summer for me. It came in the guise of a serendipitous “development” that was years in the making. One languid weekend afternoon Linda and I wandered into a local consignment shop we had been meaning to visit as we were looking for a table. An antique trunk caught my eye so I lifted the lid and discovered a large camera bag buried beneath some cloth.

And upon closer inspection, I soon realized the treasure trove that was hidden within the bag: not one but two Canon A-1 film cameras, five Canon professional lenses, a Canon flash system and tripod, and assorted Canon lens filters and caps—all of which I got for the incredible price of $30! I was able to get batteries locally but had to order the black and white film I am planning to use with it from B&H Photo in New York City for another $30, but now I am all set. 

I got the kit inspected and appraised by a couple of world class photographers associated with the prestigious Maine Media school here. They agreed that it was quite the deal, especially given its exquisite condition, and said it was worth several hundreds of dollars, if not more. And upon hearing of my experience a while later, a professional photographer friend of mine GAVE me a third Canon A-1 another person had given to him!    

So, why am I sharing this story with you all? I simply hope to encourage each of you to keep alive whatever dream you may have in your heart, be it an artistic one such as mine, or another type. You see, I had dreamed for years of getting a professional grade camera like a Canon but I could not justify the cost and I was intimidated by the technical aspects like aperture settings, etc. But not only was this camera kit the deal of the century, the A-1 was the first single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera with programmable settings for relative newcomers like me.   

In case you are as curious about the backstory of the bag as I was, here it is. The shopkeeper said the bag remained in that trunk for three years after a widow dropped it off upon her beloved husband’s death. Apparently, the couple were IBM executives who traveled the world and spared no expense for state-of-the-art photography equipment. Not only was the Canon A-1 revolutionary when it was released but it is still regarded as one of the very best cameras ever made. And for this photographer, the passage of time served to preserve an invaluable treasure.   

Point of View

It was famed photographer Mario Tostino who I first heard define photography as “writing with light.” As my business is called Lightpost Communications and my blog here is called Lightpost, my chosen media for communicating have always been both prose and pictures. And so it was with delight that I came upon a thoughtful essay about photography the other day in the New York Times entitled “Through a Lens Sharply.”

Former magazine editor Dominique Browning, author of Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas, and Found Happiness, which I had read earlier, wrote the essay about her newfound love of photography and the renewed perspective of life it has given her. Incredibly, the well traveled writer had never owned a camera until a friend gave her a simple point-and-shoot model a couple of years ago and she hasn’t quit pointing and shooting it since. While I don’t ordinarily share excerpts at such length Browning’s musings are too beautiful not to speak for themselves.

As she writes, “My pictures are evidence that I was there, that I cared enough to pay attention, that I noticed, and honored, those tiny miracles of life we are all given, along whatever path we have chosen to travel. Now, when I travel, I feel a simultaneous quickening of desire, and a thickening of time. When I scroll back over the photo rolls in my computer, I study my idiosyncratic way of seeing, and I find something I think of as my own sense of time, my own rhythm of movement through the world. It is slow, and getting slower, more deliberate, more mindful of small beauties.”

My camera roll is…a way of collecting souvenirs, which, like any trinket, might be meaningful only to me. And so what? I can scroll back through time, because of my camera, and remember where I have been, what I saw, whom I was with—and this isn’t limited to what I captured in an image. Each image triggers associated recollections, and they roll alongside, hovering around each picture.”

No one sees the world the way you do. No one. If you fall in love with a photograph, it is often because of a glimpse of recognition, even a pang of desire, that things were or should be that way—or that someone came close to seeing what you saw. The photographs we take hold a place in our personal narratives, like bookmarks. We know what led up to that moment. And only we know what came next.” What a point of view.