Wow, nine years since I went out for this fun nighttime sky photography class at the foot of Mt Elden. These photos and short story still hold a ton of fond memories.

I’m getting a feel for the new Fuji, appreciating the range of jpeg settings and having fun finding looks that I like. The neighborhood pea patch provides a lot of opportunities to try things out.

Here’s a good view of the X100VI menu system.

taking the afternoon off intensifying

I see Fuji has – finally? – released the X100VI! Look, my little 10 year old X100S is still doing quite wonderfully, but … it might be upgrade time.

A couple of photos that I like, from a quick walk around downtown today.

I found that the battery on my Fuji X-T30 no longer holds a charge, so I’m making photos this Thanksgiving with my X100S while I order a replacement battery. Gosh this camera feels so good to hold and use. It’s just so elegant and solid and graceful. I should carry it everywhere.

There’s some research somewhere — or perhaps merely a critical contention — that focusing on taking pictures instead of appreciating the moment inhibits our formation of memory. That is, the argument goes, all our social media documenting makes those moments increasingly fleeting and uncaptured. Well, I spent a good chunk of yesterday slowly making my way through 2007 in photos,¹ and was struck again and again by those memories. I took more than 4,000 photos in 2007; when I scroll through those images I am astounded by what I remember.

I shared many of those photos at the time. I was trying out my first Project 365 on flickr, and I posted at least one and sometimes several pictures per day. It was a pretty big year for me: I lived on my own in Seattle for a while during a predoctoral internship; finished my dissertation and graduated; interviewed for some jobs; made a significant career change; bought a house; and captured hundreds more daily snippets of life because I was basically taking pictures all the time. Walking through not ony the pictures that I shared, but the photos that I didn’t share, brings me back this flood of recollections.

Don’t Forget to Remember This (At John Carey’s blog, which I discovered via Shawn Blanc) is a wonderful essay about why we take pictures and about the pressures that shape what we shoot, and for whom:

The challenges present in photography today are not in the devices we use to capture, it’s not in our approach, skill level, or what we think we need to create good photos; the problem today is in social pressure. Photography has quickly evolved in its short lifespan from revolutionary, to useful, to ubiquitous and full of expectation.

John Carey works through the conflict in contemporary photography between one’s own perspective and the aesthetic driven by likes, shares and faves. So much of what he says resonates deeply, all the moreso as I think about — and look at, again — the photos I never shared: My wife, my son, moments that might be snapshots or might be carefully composed but which were shut out of sharing because perhaps they weren’t fancy enough or evocative enough, or maybe just because I had already posted a couple that day.

Some of the pictures of my wife and son (born much later than the year of photos I have been poring over this weekend) are images I would love to share; they’re so beautiful, and pictures of people have so much vibrance and life to them, which I am always so happy to preserve. But they’re also private. The stars and comments of “great capture” might superficially validate me or make me feel like a portrait photographer with a fine eye. But a flickr friend’s heart would not feel what mine does when I find, again, that lucky photo of my wife suddenly laughing, so wonderfully bright and alive.

My current camera of choice is this wonderful Fuji X100S, but previously I shot with a Pentax K100D and a growing collection of prime lenses. It’s easy to be captivated by new, fun, fine gear: gear acquisition syndrome is driven just as heavily by the peer pressure to make photos like others’ photos and in turn the notion that doing so requires having their gear. But as I look back at these older years’ collections of photos I am also struck that some of those photos are really good. Not simply because I like the subject or I found a good moment, but technically good: They’re sharp, colorful, detailed. That’s a good little camera that’s now nearby on the shelf with its FA35mm lens mounted and ready to go; that combination perfectly fit my own photographic vision for years, and I loved going out and using it.²

John Carey again:

My compositions and developing have similar fingerprints in that they tell me a lot about how I felt when I made the photographs. Every click of the shutter for me is a moment worth remembering and it’s the memories that make photography so gratifying for me. I find so much to be thankful for when I look back through the images I have captured through the years.

Back to my own memories: Exploring the photos I made that year, I can’t say that I recall every single moment. Sometimes I was detailed enough to put in a pretty good caption. But in the context of the surrounding images, I get so much back: That was a photowalk around Bellevue; this was a hike on the Arizona trail (and that summer we hiked almost every day!); here’s the celebratory drink the night I decided to go for it; the job interview trip and Half Moon Bay with my grandfather; sitting in the backyard with the dogs and making coffee. Normal days and extraordinary days all lined up next to one another.

And on and on, now with my iPhone and Fuji (regarding which I must confess that I am beginning to feel some desire for the flexibility of point of view offered by an interchangeable lens system; that’s another desire re-kindled by my back catalog and many favorite 50mm images from the old Pentax); and even more with a boy now in preschool and a city and neighborhood that I still frequently walk, camera on my shoulder.

Statistically, winters in Flagstaff average fifty inches of snow, and in practice we’re used to that meaning that some winters we really get dumped on, and other winters see rather little snow. The first winter we spent here brought us only a few storms, but since then we’ve had some pretty good seasons, including the whopper of a winter of 2010, when a four-day span dropped five feet of snow on us. That winter I was lucky enough to buy one of the last unsold snowblowers in town and just barely keep up with the storm.

This year we had the longest winter-time dry spell on record, ever: Over thirty days without so much as a whiff of precipitation. So the whole town was buzzing over the prospect of the storm that came through late this week and into the weekend. Reports are that it brought a couple of feet to the San Francisco Peaks, and we got wonderful rain here in town, where it stayed just too warm for it to fall as snow except for a brief period overnight.

I got out around town for an hour or so between storms, looking for good puddles, stormy light, and view of some of my favorite downtown scenes, as well as some new alleyway nooks and crannies.

The view toward the Monte Vista from the south side is one of the iconic pictures of this town, and it’s easy to see why. I can’t resist checking it out nearly every time I walk that direction. This night, the late sun poked through the clouds at just about the right time.

Downtown has a lot of streets at odd angles to one another, old gravel lots, and a mix of new and old construction — churches next door to motels next door to restaurants, and almost everywhere a view of the train tracks or buildings that once housed businesses related to the trains. The neighborhoods are home to small, old homes in different stages of repair, depending on how long they have served as rental housing for NAU students. I enjoy the mix of home construction, some of which shows a strong southwestern influence with Adobe and tile, while other homes are in the mountain town style of clapboard, shingles, corrugated metals. There’s one fascinating house downtown built out of converted shipping containers. Last night, there were some fun puddles to be found, shining up the late evening light.

I made it back to the car just as the storm really opened up again, cold hands flexing in the car after holding the camera in the wind and incipient rain — turning to slush and snow as the temperature dropped in the last block that I pulled up my hood, stuffed the camera back in the bag and made for the car.

A VSCO note

My photo walk was in part inspired by the need to get out of the house, and in part by Michael Laroque’s “Addicted” — VSCO Film 05 writeup. I really love Michael’s photography, and his discussion of Film 05 (I have Film 04 and Film 02, already) prompted me to pick it up after hedging for a few days — do I really need it?, I wondered. Michael knows that the point of these preset collections isn’t to make every photo look the same, but to find some inspiration in the looks they offer:

But it does mean I get to play with a new toolbox and with each and every release, some of the new emulations have triggered ideas, or found their way into my workflow in some shape or form. In many ways it’s like buying a great photography book… It inspires and shakes the status quo even if you don’t end up copying everything you’ve seen.

So, no, I don’t need it, and as a hobbyist I’m not going to make any money or anything. But I like them, and as I’ve mentioned previously, the film packs don’t take me back to my golden days of shooting film (though they do make me think about how long I spent shooting 35mm film in an automatic camera without thinking a moment about it); they help me find moods or textures or ideas that I might not have otherwise. So as someone who just enjoys this, it’s easily worth the price.

One of the things I really enjoyed last year was picking up photography again, reinvogorated by a new camera and its creative potential. By far the favorite photos I made through the year, regardless of camera, are of my wife and our preschool son, but those are just for us. These are a bakers’ dozen, particularly memorable for entirely arbitrary reasons, from among the rest.