Month: August 2019

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On Cave Dwelling…

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Some days, I feel like a cave dweller, and others I feel like a contributing member of society.  This is true at work and in my life in general.

At work, I can get so focused on a project that I look up from lunch and its eight o’clock in the evening.  The light in my office turns off after 20 minutes or so, and it cannot see my fingers furiously typing, just my head staring at the screen—immobile and resolute.  As a consequence, I often find myself working in the dark, too.

If you were to talk to Anna, she would tell you that the cave-dweller lighting is a personal favorite of mine, and I am not going to deny that I like a dark room as much as the next hermit.

I have had a particularly social week, with lunches every day with various people, and to my utter surprise, I am not burned out by it.  As a consummate introvert, too much contact with other people used to drain me, and if they were the wrong people, I suppose it still would.  Some switch has been flipped in me, and suddenly I can find myself enjoying being out with people…in moderate doses.  Perhaps a switch flip is a bit too optimistic; it’s more like my extroversion dimmer has been turned up a few shades.

The irony is that I took this photograph on one of the mornings that Kemper did not want to come hike with me, and so I was alone.  I had a very interesting internal monologue, in which I admitted that I missed the minion being with me, but I also found that I absolutely enjoyed being able to go at my own speed, without the lamentations of a six-year-old.  I like my alone time, but I am like Goldilocks when it comes to being alone.  I like it, but on my own unreasonable terms.

When Kemper, Nora, and Anna were down in Disney, I enjoyed the first couple hours, and then I became restless.  I was, in fact, longing for human interaction.  It was so unlike me.  I ate at a barbeque restaurant in Ponte Vedra and chatted up the cook as I sat at the bar; I went to Trader Joe’s and Publix, and when I got home, I turned a baseball game on, just so the sound of voices resonated through the house in a paltry attempt at connection with people.

As I have become more comfortable with myself over the last four years, I have also become more comfortable with others.  I still like my caves every once in a while, but more often now, I am willing to come into the light.

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On Surviving…

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We survived the first day.

No call.  No tears.  No arson.

All in all, a good start to the first grade.

Now you may think that I am being a bit melodramatic—after all, Kemp is a good kid—but I am also being realistic after the ups and downs of last year.

No child is perfect, and this is a lesson that we learned the hard way when Kemper came back from Christmas break last year.  He has matured exponentially over the summer, and I knew that he would be in a different place, with a different teacher, who has more experience and, perhaps, more patience with little boys who just want to make you laugh.

The kid has a heart of gold, as I did at his age.  He only wants to please, and I lose sight of this in the moments where he is being obstinate or so literal that it makes you want to pull the three hairs you have left on your head out (personally speaking).  I lost some of that innocence and pureness of spirit in college and law school, but I feel like I am slowly gaining it back—which just goes to show that it does not have to be lost.

I know that I need to foster this uncharacteristic empathy and softness inside of him, and make him understand that despite the sometimes-toxic masculinity that the world presents as the paradigm, it is ok to be sensitive and caring, and it is ok to embrace the empathy that is innate within him.  I hope that he is able to hold onto these characteristics for as long as he can, at least through his formative years, because it is a lot easier to go back to a learned behavior than to start from scratch.

So now we wait for the call.  Maybe it will not come this year.  Maybe he’s bled all of the angst from his system, but I don’t think so.  I see the anxiety in his great big brown eyes, and the concern for things much larger than himself, and in those concerns, I revisit my own childhood and force myself to think of how I can make it easier for him, how I can facilitate finding himself in the morass that is growing up.

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On a New Year…

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To say that it was a quiet weekend would be something of an understatement.  Anna and the kids went down to Disney with a friend, and I was left to fend for myself in utter silence.  In my defense, I had made plans to go fishing with a buddy, but his boat was in the shop, and he ended up going out of town.  My solitude, therefore, was not completely of my own choosing—but I embraced it nonetheless.

Kemper starts school tomorrow—first grade—and to have seen him grow up just this summer has been amazing.  Last year was a learning experience for all involved, and I am not naïve enough to think that the first few weeks of the new schoolyear will be without its ups and downs.  Once he settles in, though, I am hopeful that this year will be even better than the last.

Nora begins a three day-a-week program soon, as well, and she blossomed in her “class” last year.  She is social, but I am terribly curious to see what her new independent, sassy streak will mean to her previously demure behavior.  As they say, history seldom remembers well-behaved women, so her cheekiness will likely serve her well.  It is something that her brother and I can foster with great aplomb.  I knew that she wouldn’t stay the sweet little cherub forever, and I am so enjoying her personality as it comes out more and more each day.

Life is good, and I look forward to seeing how much better it gets this year.

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On Thoughts of Fall in August

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As a consequence of the poison oak debacle that I have chronicled in my earlier posts, I went to the doctor, who prescribed some fairly powerful steroids to hasten my recovery.  One of the side effects, it turns out, is a heightened sensitivity to heat, which in the throes of summer in Florida is about as easy to avoid as sand in a desert.

Long story short, I got very dizzy, and I needed a bit in the artificial permafrost of my office to cool down and recover.  Once regained my bearings, this photograph flashed across the television on my wall that I use to display my photographs.  I took it last fall in North Carolina, and it immediately gave me a feeling of deep longing, and almost regret that I wasn’t there right now–even though summers in the Piedmont of North Carolina are about as miserable as in Florida.

I reflected on this nostalgia, literally an aching for one’s home, and it came to me that during my ten years outside of Florida, first in North Carolina and then in Virginia, I never felt the longing to be back in Florida like I do now longing to be back in Winston-Salem or even Richmond.  I missed my family dearly in Florida, and enjoyed every time that I came back to visit, but there is just something about Carolina and Virginia that make me long to be back there.

Perhaps it is that I loved Wake Forest so much.  I met Anna there, grew up there, and learned more about the world and myself than I had ever done in the eighteen years prior.  But a part of me thinks that it was the fall that draws me back, even today–the crisp mornings that we walked from campus through the grounds of the Reynolda House and through the village, the chilly strolls around campus with a steaming cup of coffee or chai, and the leaves that scudded across the bricks of the upper quad when the October wind picked up and you gathered your jacket that much closer around you.

Sure, Florida has fall, but its not the same.  Even the oak trees that were skeletons by November in Richmond balk at the coming winter in Florida.  There is no thought of jumping in the car and driving the half-hour to Pilot Mountain to see the leaves changing before your very eyes.  Fall, as we knew it in North Carolina, does not exist this far south.  But I am happy here.  I have an incredible job, and an incredible family that is only minutes away, and my roots are growing into the sandy soil slowly but surely.

Still, I feel that pang of remorse that comes over me when I remember the falls I spent at Wake Forest, and I know someday I will return in some capacity.  Until that time, as James Taylor said, “I’m going to Carolina in my mind.”

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On Miniature Versions of Yourself

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Although I have written a fair amount about Kemper and his travels with me, I have not given Nora her due credit.  The munchkin was a trooper on the trails, much better in fact than the minion was at his age.  For anyone who knows me, you can see from Nora’s face and general baby-bulbousness, the apple did not fall far from the tree.  There is, as I am wont to say, no denying that this one belongs to me.

She is a mellow little thing, until something lights her red hair on fire, and then she can throw a tantrum with the best of them.  Yes, she gets this from me, too.  She adores Kemper, and if she had her druthers, she would just follow around him the whole day keeping him company and playing with whatever toys he didn’t requisition from her (with force) because they were too small, and she might choke on them.

Because her mind is curious and wanders, she is great for candids (as this shot attests), and I look forward to using her as a subject as she grows up around me with speed that I didn’t think was possible, even though I have seen it firsthand with Kemper.

 

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On the Perfect Composition

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I have taken many photographs that I am proud of, but there are some that I finish developing, set aside for a day or so, and then come back to with a sense of wonder that I actually took the shot.  This is one such picture.

Compositionally it is exactly what I was going for.  I am a disciple of the “rule of thirds,” which you can see in many of my photographs.  It is why you rarely, if ever, see my subject in the middle of the frame.  I think it distinguishes amateur photography from more advanced photography, and it was one of the first rules I ever followed.  It’s a simple trick to make the photos look more professional, and it works beautifully in this photograph.

Like the post yesterday, this one employs a long exposure to soften the movement of the water around the rocks.  It was a bit more overcast on this day, and so I was able to take an eight second exposure, which completely blurred out the individual waves.  Because I was able to manipulate the light with the neutral density filter, the sky and sunlight appear much more golden and clearer than the actual atmosphere of the day would have permitted.

Most of the other shots that I took without using a long exposure from that day were gloomy, almost gothic captures of the rocky coastline.  This one is anything but gloomy, and that in and of itself is an accomplishment.  Because I had to take my time framing the shot, focusing, putting the filter on, manually adjusting the exposure settings, and only then firing the shutter, the photograph is not accidentally great like many of mine turn out to be.  It was one of the rare shots where I saw the composition in my mind and then captured it exactly how I wanted it.  Overall, it is one of my favorite photographs from the trip.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @stamandphotos and on Instagram @stamandphotography.

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On Capturing Time

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The post’s title might lead one to think that this is going to be a philosophical post, which I regret to inform you, it is not.  This is a post on process, and the ability through some doing, to capture just a bit more than an instant in time with a camera.  Ansel Adams once noted that “You don’t take a photograph; you make it.”  This spoke to his process of spending hours in the darkroom on a single photograph.  Although he captured it through his camera, the photograph was as much about what he made of it as what he took.  This is why post-processing is such an important part of photography, whether in the physical dark room, or in digital software, such as Lightroom and Photoshop, which I use.

This trip, I set out to make photographs.  On the days that Kemp did not burst into our bedroom with the drive to go hiking with daddy, I took it upon myself to go to Garrapata and try out something that I had been wanting to do for a while: long exposure photography.

The premise of long exposure photography is pretty simple.  The shutter of the camera stays open for a longer period of time, letting more light in, and capturing a much longer “exposure.”  An “average” exposure in good lighting might be 1/250th of a second, whereas my long exposures this trip ranged from 1 seconds to 30 seconds.  If I were to have taken them by simply setting the shutter speed longer, too much light would have hit the sensor, and the shot would have been overexposed and completely white.  To counteract this, I gave my lens sunglasses…basically.

A neutral density (ND) filter blocks out a substantial portion of light so that the shutter can stay open for a long time, while allowing just enough light in to correctly expose the shot.  I used a 10-stop ND filter, which is on the darker, denser end of the filters.  This allowed me to capture 1 to 30 seconds of exposure in bright morning light.  This photograph is an awesome example of what resulted.  This one is only about 2 seconds, but it captures the movement of the waves, rather than freezing them in time like some of my other photographs.  You can’t see the individual droplets of water, but you can see the curves and currents, which are absent in the others.

One long exposure shot takes about 5-10 minutes to set up, because you have to frame the shot, focus the camera, put the filter on, adjust the settings manually to account for the filter, shoot the photo, and then go back to make sure everything was exposed correctly.  As such, it was a perfect exercise to undertake whilst Kemper wasn’t around.  The chorus of “I want a cimminum roll,” or “Are you finished yet,” would have made the morning a bit less enjoyable than it was simply taking my time and capturing 10-20 photos, rather than the hundred or so every other morning.  Still, I missed the little guy’s company.  Luckily, he did not stay away for too long.

Photographs are generally about capturing an infinitely small moment forever.  Sometimes, however, you can capture a bit more, like the curves of a wave or the flow of the current over the rocks.  I have always loved long exposure shooting, and I was so excited to be able to try it out this trip.

Also, follow me on Twitter @stamandphotos.

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On the Path Less Traveled By

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As an English major and a writer, I find metaphors in just about everything I do.  Just as I referenced the metaphor of Kemper on the path in yesterday’s post, this photograph of divergent paths struck me when I came upon it during a solo hike in Garrapata.  Kemper had decided that three days of strenuous hiking in a row was enough daddy-son time, and he sat that morning out—with the express condition that I bring a cinnamon (pronounced “cimminum”) roll for him on my way back through the village.

I love this photograph, not for the intrinsic compositional value of it, but because it is the literal embodiment of Frost’s poem (sans the yellow wood).  I took the one less traveled by, and indeed it did make all the difference.  It has, quite probably, scarred me for life.  Not exactly the effect that it had on Frost, but this is reality and Frost’s poem was a metaphor.

You can see in the bottom right corner, if you zoom in on the photograph, the incipient bunch of tripartite leaves of what, it turns out, is poison oak.  It was so prevalent along the paths, that certainly no one in their right mind would have traipsed through virulent shrubbery, and so I paid it no further thought until a few days post-hike.  Further, I am used to poison ivy, which grows on a vine rather than a bush of regret and sadness.  Sadly, some of the evils of the West Coast are disguised as hedgerows.

The path was, at the time, a fun little adventure.  It meandered closer to the edge of the cliffs’ edges, while keeping a respectful distance from the precipice in most spots.  There was a dodgy stretch, but some travelers, as disinclined to stride along a hare’s-breath of path juxtaposed against a sixty-foot plummet, had cut a secondary looping jaunt (through the damnable undergrowth) that avoided the cliff’s edge and certain death.  This was acceptable to me, and quite lovely, on account of the omnipresent, verdant, and then-innocuous shrub of despair.

When Anna, Nora, Kemper and I came to Garrapata later that day, I took Kemper on a small section of the secondary trail.  He was reticent to follow, but, ultimately, he did.  I told him only “big kids” could come on the path, and this was enough to carry the day.  Luckily it was chilly, and he was wearing jeans and a jacket – fully armored against the chaparral of anguish.

By Kemper’s age (6.5 years) I had already broken both of my wrists, sliced my thumb to the bone with a utility knife, and cracked a few toes; but he has, heretofore, not suffered any major bodily injuries.  He is cautious of the unbeaten paths, for which I am grateful.  In Frost’s poem, the narrator does not rush headlong down the path less traveled by.  Instead, “long I stood / and looked down one as far as I could / to where it bent in the undergrowth.”  As impulsive as he can be, this is Kemper’s general approach to life choices.  It will serve him well.

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On the Journey Ahead

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I am sure that in a few years (e.g., when he hits puberty) the allure of Kemper walking away from me on a wooded path will have gone the way of Old Yeller, but for now, I cannot stop taking pictures of him doing just that.  If I ever work up the gumption to have a gallery show at my in-laws’ art gallery, I will have material for a whole wall of “Minion Marching” photos.

I love photographs of paths, and I love photographing Kemper.  Although he has the memory of an eidetic elephant, I hope that he will be able to remember the trips we took when he was younger through the pictures that I have taken.  He is walking through the path of life (sorry, I’m not sorry…I was an English major), and these photographs are as much about his journey as anything.

For now, I will walk behind making sure that he does not stray too far.  In the not so distant future, these photos of him walking in front of me will take on new, different significance.

 

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