How busy is too busy?
For a freelancer, in those insecure moments (meaning, the default setting) when you fear and expect that the current job is the last one you ever get, the answer ought to be, there is no such state as too busy. But Robin has been complaining. "If this is what you’re like when you’ve got work, I think I liked you better when you didn’t." I’m snappish and irritable, and everything feels urgent and overdue and overwhelming. I’m taking it out on my loved ones. Maybe I’m too busy.
This morning, my Switzerland shoot got delayed by three weeks. As a result, I am much calmer. The client that wanted me for next Tuesday has me now. I can book my no-budget artist shoots for later this week. My schedule feels roomy now, which I suppose is only a matter of perspective from the sounds of this. Yesterday I didn’t know if, five days from now, I was going to be shooting in Lugano or not. As it is, I’ll get back from Chicago, then turn around and go to Europe. But that’s three weeks off. To celebrate, Robin and I walked around Green Lake, and I shot stick pictures.
Stick pictures is a shorthand term I use for a particular brand of my landscape work. I like those brushy edges of places, especially in winter when the leaves are gone and visual chaos reigns. In the midst of these complex places, I try and tease out something structural from the mess. The important part of the work is that I engage a part of my photographic brain that is seeing this stuff sharper and deeper than my conscious mind can. It is from this state of awareness that the photographs emerge. If I control the process consciously, I miss the shot. It’s as if, by being in such a complex situation, I swamp my usual visual response. It has to come from someplace else. In these photographs I am doing the deepest work I do as a photographer.
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