Between Valley and Mountain Top

All through the night I dreamt how I would change the way I used the camera and what kind of photography I would be doing. Dreams don't augur the future; they reflect our current concerns.

I canceled the photo shoot this morning with Angelina. It was the first shoot that I scheduled since the new Canon D5 arrived. Yesterday when I called the model to cancel I just didn't feel I could do the shoot justice. I felt I needed to rethink what I wanted to do before proceeding.

The trip to John Robert Powers last week (only last week? It feels longer ago than that!) made me stop to rethink where I was going with photography. Shooting Kaleb in May undoubtedly was an eye-opener. I had not enjoyed myself like that ever before! Since then I've shot eight other people. My shoots with Arron, Scott and Lenny repeated the kind of excitement I felt with Kaleb. The shoots generated photos that were good, especially now that I know to use white-balance adjustment. 

I have learned a lot since that first shoot in May but good is not good enough. More to the point: what do I really want to do with photographs? 

To get beyond just good I need to do more than what I am doing. I have to push myself into doing spectacular work. I should probably work with a successful advertising, portrait or commercial photographer to learn the trade at closer range. Or I should learn the technology of digital photography better. Instead of shooting on the fly I should plan shoots more carefully. I should work on concept. Moviemaking requires a good script. In photography, concept is the equivalent of a script. I can always learn more from simply photographing people but I need to be clearer in my mind what it is I want to accomplish. From an overall vision I should then create individual projects.

Projects come from one's vision but are most successful when harnessed to a real-life demand. Watching last night the BBC's  2007 two-part documentary of Russian music and culture icon, Tchaikovsky, dramatized for me the marriage between personal and public circumstances. Tchaikovsky as a child complained of intrusive musical ideas. It was a driving force in his life. He gamely went along with family and societal dictates and schooled himself to be a Czarist civil servant but a few months doing this was enough. He quit and devoted himself to making a career as a composer.

His homosexuality was another driving force for Tchaikovsky. His music became his one outlet for the conflict his sexuality caused in his life. He longed for the security of a married heterosexual man and the conflict drove him to write the passionate, romantic music that he may not have written had he been what he wished he was.

What is my passion? How do I channel my own conflicts, those issues with which I have done battle all my life, into creativity?

Photography was not uppermost in my mind when I decided to take a sabbatical from clinical work last December. I wanted to get out of a career that I had spent 40 years of my life when I really did not like what I was doing. But where to go was the question. The sabbatical was going to help me find the answer to that one question. Is photography the answer?

Every morning, before I do anything else, I write. Images are an acquired passion. Writing, too, is something I learned to do. Fueling both is my true passion: examining life experience and attempting to understand it. But examining is itself meaningless unless I put the insights into a form that not only communicates them but allows the viewer or reader to experience the insights for themselves.

Insights speak to the intellectual aspect of passion. Intellect is perhaps best depicted by culture and at the heart of culture are two modes of expression: ideas and images. Philosophy is the mountain top of one, art of the other. Both require a crystalline intelligence, the best that a man or woman could hope to cultivate in the course of a lifetime.

And how is this intelligence best expressed? In our lives. The circle is complete.