when the accessory becomes the main thing

I was reading an old post on one of my favourite blogs – sadly Elise is no longer blogging with any sort of regularity – where she says:

Every time I hit a digital photo with a filter or action I’m trying to get a piece of a magic that is already baked into film prints. It’s crazy! Sure, I could update my digital camera and learn how to use Photoshop better and probably have some good results. But then I‘d be spending my time dealing with endless .jpg data instead of just snapping and calling it good.

– Elise Blaha Cripe

And all of a sudden, it hit me. It hit me that whilst I am trying, or was trying, to get better at it, photography became this all consuming post production thing which wasn’t enjoyable when you’re looking at hundreds of images in one sitting, selecting the best out of about 10 that are exactly the same, and then you have to apply all these filters to make it come to life. 

This space was resting on two pillars, my love of writing and my love of photography. For far too long, I’ve been focussing on figuring out why I’d stopped writing – largely lack of time or prioritisation of time – but I never quite stopped to think about what had been stopping my photography. Now I know and it feels quite liberating.

For the last couple of years, I can’t quite say I’ve been my balanced, at equilibrium self and I didn’t really know that was the case, or not enough to put it into words. The reasons? I wasn’t connecting with my two forces of balance. Since fo.re.ver I’ve been writing to make sense of the world. More recently I added photography to the mix and the two have become the positive forces that ground me. It should come as no surprise that I’ve been feeling somewhat lost at sea about things, even if in an intangible way. 

What does come as a surprise is how this realisation somehow realigns things instantly. As if all that is left to do is write and photograph. The basics. Simple stuff, my kind of stuff. My at peace self is off to its own retreat of beauty in narrative and visual stories.

Have a lovely weekend too!