The past

[StartingHealing]

Greetings to all the brave souls here.

I've had a project of digitizing physical pictures for a while now.  One of those off and on projects that it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get done.

I got into a packet of them that I didn't remember having and within it was images of events that at the time I was so happy and excited about and yet the downstream outcomes of those events were not good.  Not good at all to put it mildly.  It was like I was gut punched repeatedly in the solar plexus.  They were pictures of when I got married to the now former PD+ spouse. The + is because I believe she has at least 1 (perhaps more) mental illness(es) as a comorbidity with the PD. Based on her behaviors that makes sense. 

Lordy I was sooo happy at that time!  All the usual tropes.  Feelings of finding my person, being understood, someone that had my back all of that.  I know that it was all smoke and mirrors.  It was the love bombing, reflecting myself back at me slightly altered so she could lock in a source of supply on the emotional / financial / physical welfare fronts and effectively be a parasite. 

25 years.  25 years of ongoing drama. Even during the "good" times. 25 years of descending into the depths of Hades. 25 years of ... I used the top 100 list of behaviors as a checklist back when I started to realize that I had to exit that situation and she was engaging in at least 97-98 of them. 

Yeah.

My current experience life wise is good.  It's calm and peaceful. Nov of this year will be 2 years since becoming single again. June of this year was 3 years of 0 contact with her outside of courtroom crapola.  I have been working on learning myself again. Attempting to be my own best friend.  There are times that I'll get outside input from a male therapist more as a troubleshooter type of thing rather than an ongoing thing.  I'll also run stuff by my brother from another mother and my spiritual mentor. There are people that help me see the forest instead of the trees. Having objective people that care helps a lot.  I'm very thankful for them.

Those photographs    I made a pyre out of them.  Burned it all to ash and then flushed the ashes.  Sub-conscious mind likes that kind of stuff.  Sends a clear message that it's over.  I had been figuring that I was doing pretty good with healing up, dealing with the effects of being in a relationship with a PD+ person for that long.  And wham!  those pictures.  All the old mix of emotions hit.  Anger, grief, pain, betrayed, desire for retribution.  Kind of feels like when a scab gets caught on something and gets ripped off before the flesh below has fully healed. 

I will get back to where I was before this. It hasn't erased all the progress I've made.  Still sucks though.

Wishing all here all the best

[square]

Yeah, that stuff hurts.

You had hopes but they were lies, and that hurts. It's a loss of innocence.

Glad to hear you're doing well.

[StartingHealing]

Yeah, that stuff hurts.

You had hopes but they were lies, and that hurts. It's a loss of innocence.

Glad to hear you're doing well.

Hi square.  Loss of innocence?  Yeah I can see that. 

I'm hanging in there.  Rocking the solo thing is definitely an experience now. chuckle  Been many a moon since the last time and I'm learning or perhaps re-learning me, myself and I.  I do need to get back into doing more of my hobbies.

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Hobbies are important. That's where you get to be you. It can't all be just the grind, your interests are where you grow and thrive.

[StartingHealing]

I went for a wander about this morning and the light was so wonderful I doubled back to the residence and grabbed a 35mm 100% manual film camera and went back out.  3 different hummingbirds, one that was talking up a storm at me (I think) honey bees doing the bee thing with the flowers in bloom, and a couple of bumblebees fussing with the honey bees to snag some nectar.  Then went along a water canal and there was a duckling, trees being reflected in the water, fish that were close enough to the surface that they could be seen,  got some good shots I reckon.  I've looked into the "great" phototogs of the past and most got their renown from 1 out of every 100 shots.  They just shot more and kept working on their "eye". 

Finished the roll of film that was loaded.  By the time that happened I was pleasantly spent.  I'll have to ship the roll off for processing and to get the negatives / prints back.  Maybe in the future I will get into developing and making my own prints via darkroom set up.  To me there is something warm and welcoming about analog photographs that digital innately doesn't have.

 Don't get me wrong there is some hella nice digital systems out there.  Even then, the post processing etc is where the visual data gets transformed into images. And digital anything has hard edges that are picked up by the eye even if they are not perceived by the visual cortex. 

I don't know where I read / heard this: "It is the purpose of the photographer to find beauty in the every day and capture it so others can also marvel at it."  That really stuck you know?  When I go out with a camera I have a different frame of mind.  I'm actually seeking beauty and a bit of a story and it appears that the world responds to that. Almost as if the world is conspiring with me to show off it's treasures for the eye. 

I needed what I saw today.  I needed those reminders.   

[square]

I pulled up some notes I took a few months ago on photography.

Roland Barthes - talked about denotation vs connotation. Whereas your photographs may have denotated hummingbirds, bumblebees and honeybees, fish, and various other elements in the frame, they may have connoted interaction, curiousity, and connection (hummingbird), competition, playfulness, dominance or cooperation in a shared space (bees), or the revelation of secret lives, lived so close to us yet unobserved or ignored (fish).

Susan Sontag - wrote about the "procedures" of connotation such as aestheticism. She described how photographers chronicling the Great Depression didn't publish just any raw photo but curated the ones that told the story effectively.

Lots of great thoughts out there on what purpose a photograph serves and its relation to reality (does the act of observation change it? Is it reality if the photographer chooses to omit items from the frame, or discards prints from a roll that doesn't serve an aesthetic or narrative goal?).

Using 35mm film sounds great. Many years ago I had access to a darkroom - still remember the smell of the chemicals and the cozy feel of the red light. And it's always a surprise to see exactly what develops.

I hope you continue to get back into it and find out more about who you are and the world we live in.

[StartingHealing]

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believe it or not film is coming back as a medium.  Kodak is actually ramping up production and there are film companies that have come on the scene like Ilford.  There is even a 1600 speed film now. Holy crap they even brought back a version of Polaroid fer goodness sakes. 

I found a lab in a different state that does top drawer work.  Even with mailing costs they are still significantly cheaper than anything local.  If you would like I'll share the name of lab with you. 

Yes in some ways it's a pain in the butt, however, there is a realness, and that realness helps me turn outward to "see", to observe.  Now does the act of observation change the situation?  Someone was observing that situation before I showed up. Does my observation affect the other observer? Or is the idea of the observer affect been altered in some manner before it was dumped into the zeitgeist of humans?     

I went down the rabbit hole of what is reality?  And honestly each one of us has a version of it.  I ran across this thought experiment a while ago and it caused me to really stop and contemplate.  The thought experiment is:

Which version of you is the real you?  Because the checkout person at store ABC is filtering everything through their own experiences / beliefs / projections.  What about at store XYZ?  Same deal right?  How many versions of you are there then?  How many versions of you are from thoughts and beliefs that you got indoctrinated into and then broke out of?   I believe that certain humans are always in the process of becoming, dropping the old that no longer serves along the way. (For a interesting rabbit hole take a look at the human NPC theory.)

To me this is the Zen mind thing that they use to get people to break out of rigid patterns of thought.  Like the koans. 

Everything is multifaceted in actuality, in my opinion. How can it not be?  It's the reductionist ideas from the so called "scientific method" that have jacked us up.  I have a multitude of photographic galleries bookmarked and from time to time, go to those webpages and look.  Some images I like, some I don't even if it was the same person that took them. 

Some hit a spot that goes "yes" and I take note of those.  So when I go shoot film I'm looking for that "yes".  There are times that for the story in the photo, some elements if left in frame, would dilute the story as far as the story that I see, and while the technical aspects could be 100% it's a "meh" photo. 

By nature or nurture, or maybe it's because I'm in process of becoming, there are situations, a view of the agreed upon reality, that to me tell a huge story with a lot of emotional impact, in short I find certain things beautiful, certain things are compelling to me.  Some shots I'm playing in the macro range, and some I'm attempting to snag the vastness of distance that I perceive. 

The morning light hitting a tree leaf and making it glow as if lit from within while another one next to it is still in 98% shadow, the wavy reflection of a tree in disturbed water, the visible water wake and slit cloud behind a fish, A jet carving a line across the cloudless sky, a self portrait of camera to eye in a house window, even a dandelion with dew on it as the morning sun lights it up, a honeybee in a honeysuckle flower head towards the opening, caked in pollen cleaning its wings getting ready to fly.  King palm trees that look like some huge field of mushrooms against the mountains,

I'm not attempting to copy photos done by others that give me that "yes".  At the same time they do have an influence. From time to time there are certain aspects, in certain photos that I've taken that have elements of other's "eye" or composition ability. Like how music has influenced musicians which they take and make it their own, put their own twist on it.  Stevie Ray, Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Rev. Horton Heat, and so forth.

The lab will get my 2 rolls of film tomorrow if the tracking is right.  Then I'll get negatives + prints and a gallery of scanned to digital in about 2 weeks.  Will be interesting to see what I get back. 

All the best to you

[Rebel13]

I believe that certain humans are always in the process of becoming, dropping the old that no longer serves along the way. (For a interesting rabbit hole take a look at the human NPC theory.)

To me this is the Zen mind thing that they use to get people to break out of rigid patterns of thought.  Like the koans. 

My guy Rick Hanson calls this "Getting comfortable with being a person-process rather than a brick-like self." 

[StartingHealing]

My guy Rick Hanson calls this "Getting comfortable with being a person-process rather than a brick-like self." 
[/quote]

Good quote.