Month: July 2024

We like to talk about "making magic" and I am the first to assert that photography is somehow more than the sum total of its technical bits. I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation yesterday with Jesse Ray Muse during a break from her usual habit of nosing around new places in search of places to shoot.

After almost a decade of compulsive work, I'm trying to slow myself down and think more, perhaps shoot less. It crossed my mind that my day might be better spent doing something more obviously productive and I couldn't have been more wrong. I also didn't manage to take a deep breath and slow myself down much. I was shooting for framing and keeping a minor eye on metering rather than squinting at the tiny screen in the lowering sun. We were visiting a meadow that I've been hitting every few weeks during our cold and gusty Spring and found that the plush field I'd grown accustomed to had become dry and brittle after a week of crazy high temperatures. More fun, the grass had gone to seed in armfuls of burrowing splinters and a layer of burrs waited eagerly for every step. I knew better than to wear socks but the water-sandals I had chosen for an earlier waterfall quickly gained an ankle bracelet of poky awfulness. Jessa was a total trooper and managed to make the place look like it was in its first blush of blooming wonder.

We both had an appreciation of maps and road trips and compared notes back and forth. The whole thing was so easygoing and off-the-cuff that on the way home I became afraid that we hadn't worked hard enough. That maybe we had missed an opportunity. I needn't have worried. There was a particular mood and, yes, magic to the afternoon that jumped up and presented itself immediately.

Shot mostly on a Nikon D800 with a trusty Sigma 24-105mm f4 that, tbh, has never looked like this before.